Eduardo González
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Arancha González Laya, yesterday took advantage of her official visit to Brazil to demand a “commitment on deforestation” in the framework of the agreement between the EU and Mercosur, whose ratification has been paralyzed, precisely, by the criticism of France, Germany and other European countries to the Brazilian government for deforestation in the Amazon.
González Laya made these statements during the joint press conference with her Brazilian counterpart, Carlos Alberto Franco França, to whom he conveyed Spain’s solidarity with Brazil due to the uncontrolled increase of the COVID-19 pandemic. “It is in difficult moments that one discovers one’s true friends, and with this visit we wanted to tell Brazil and the Brazilian people that Spain is a good friend of theirs,” the minister assured. “We have wanted to demonstrate this by responding promptly to the request made by the Brazilian government to the EU for support with medical supplies,” she continued. “It is a modest contribution but we know how important it is, because we have also gone through this situation, to have the support of friends,” she added.
The minister also expressed Spain’s “willingness to collaborate with Brazil to scale up vaccine production” and recalled the proposal presented yesterday by the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, at the Social Summit in Oporto to “make intellectual property rules more flexible, scale up production, eliminate obstacles to trade in vaccines and inputs for manufacturing vaccines and speed up the distribution of vaccines”.
González Laya also recalled that “Spain is a major investor in Brazil, almost 80,000 million dollars and almost 200,000 direct jobs generated by Spanish investment in this country”. “I have come to tell the Brazilian government that Spain and its companies will continue to invest in this country, in infrastructure, in energy, in water, in sanitation, in railroads, in all those sectors that the Brazilian government, at the federal level, and the Brazilian states are opening up to competition,” she said. For this reason, “we are going to hold a great Spain-Brazil business forum, which will take place in the second part of this year, in which we will seek to connect our companies to these new business opportunities,” she announced.
“We have also talked about the agreement between the EU and Mercosur“, which is “a priority for Spain and which “is not just a trade agreement, it is a strategic agreement”, said González Laya. The agreement, she continued, “can open up great commercial opportunities for industry, for agriculture, for investment in Europe and in Mercosur” and contains “the best chapter on sustainability of all those signed by the EU so far”.
However, she admitted, “the sustainability chapter, in its current state, is not enough and that is why we need to perfect this agreement by creating a kind of additional protocol, a reciprocal commitment of Mercosur and the EU with the Paris Agreement and with the agreement for the Protection of Biodiversity and also with commitments on deforestation”. “I think there is a desire, a willingness on both sides, by Europe and by Mercosur, to specify this commitment, to deepen the sustainability part of the EU-Mercosur agreement in the coming months so that we can move forward in a process of approval of this agreement,” she added.
Precisely, the ratification of the agreement has been paralyzed since June 2019 because of the increase in fires and deforestation in the Amazon since the coming to power of President Jair Bolsonaro in January 2019, to the point of having become a non-negotiable stumbling block for France, Germany and other countries, which have refused to ratify the agreement for that reason. Recently, the European Commission asked the Brazilian government and the other Mercosur members to commit in writing, in an annex to the agreement, to strengthen their environmental protection policies and to curb deforestation. For his part, the EU representative in Brazil, the Spaniard Ignacio Ybáñez, declared last December that no progress will be made towards ratification of the agreement as long as Brazil does not commit itself to halting deforestation of the Amazon rainforest.
On the other hand, during the press conference, the minister conveyed “Spain’s clear and unequivocal support for Brazil’s rapid entry into the OECD” and highlighted the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding, signed yesterday by the two ministers, establishing a Brazil-Spain Bilateral Permanent Commission. Arancha González Laya also met in Brasilia with the Minister of Economy, Paulo Guedes; and with the Minister of Agriculture, Tereza Cristina; and was received in audience, on Thursday night, by President Jair Bolsonaro at the Planalto Palace, with whom she addressed “bilateral relations and the desire to strengthen relations between the EU and Latin America”, as reported in her Twitter account.
