The EU-CELAC Summit begins with great expectations. Will he be able to achieve it?

With our correspondent in Brussels, Esther Herrera.

the European Union He wants the main message of this summit to be those relations with latin america And again, the Caribbean is top priority.

After years in which the two regions have turned their backs on each other and without a high-profile summit in eight years, there are difficult issues. Closing the conclusions text will not be easy.

“In the middle of the last decade, we witnessed a series of changes, with lower growth, less dynamism in international investment and trade flows, after the great crisis of 2008-2009. Discourses and positions opposed to globalization and openness emerged: with Trump in the United States or with Britain’s exit from the European Union In Latin America, there were also political differences, especially due to the Venezuelan crisis. All this made it difficult to coordinate between the two regions, ”says Carlos Quinan, economist at the Graduate Institute of Latin America at the new Sorbonne University.

They are still looking for how to find an adequate way to condemn the war in Ukraine, as well as include the rejection of slavery, at the request of the bloc SilacIn a language that satisfies everyone.

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45,000 million euros of investment

Although not many tangible results are expected from the meeting, it is expected that there will be a lot of space for boosting bilateral relations and investments.

Indeed, the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der LeyenOn Monday, it announced a €45,000m package of its Global Gateway investment plan, which is intended for energy transformation or critical investment across Latin America and the Caribbean.

After a meeting with the Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da SilvaVon der Leyen also emphasized that he hopes to finalize the agreement with the Mercosur bloc and the agreements with Chile and Mexico as soon as possible.

From both Europe and Latin America, concern was expressed about the inequalities that were agreed upon Mercosur It can breed in both regions.

Mercosur paradox

“Being bilateral and multilateral, we oppose free trade agreements. We still demand the exclusion of agriculture and food from the WTO agreements because for us they should not be the target of maneuvers in financial markets and speculation,” defended Lawrence Marandola, spokesman for the French Peasant Union, in RFI.

The European Union also demands from Mercosur greater guarantees to protect the environment in its conditions. The paradox in this case is that the European Union is practicing, on the one hand, this type of new protectionist measure, but the reality says the opposite on the other hand. If we look at the 2022 data in terms of trade, the main items that were exported from Mercosur to the European Union were primarily oil and hydrocarbons,” says Oscar Fernandez-Gilén, economist and professor at the University of Los Andes, in Colombia.

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Brussels insists on concluding the summit in which Latin America and Europe are partners not only natural, but finally also by choice.