The Minister of Economy of France, Antoine Armand, warned that his country will try block the free trade agreement between the EU and Mercosur “by all means” within their reach and announced that he will try to convince other partners of the bloc to prevent the pact from prospering.
The French Government will use “all means, including institutional and voting means in the European scaleso that the EU-Mercosur agreement, as it is, does not go ahead,” Armand said in an interview with Sud Radio.
He thus alluded to the objections of Paris, which considers competition with Mercosur “unfair” because it does not apply the same phytosanitary rules as in Europe.
The statements coincide with the beginning of protests in France by farmers’ and ranchers’ unions, driven, in part, by discontent with the possibility of the pact between the community bloc and that of the South American countries (Brazil, Argentina) going ahead. , Paraguay and Uruguay).
The new team of the European Commission (EC), again led by Ursula von der Leyen, has as one of its first objectives to approve the agreement to countering China’s influence in Latin America.
At first, the Minister of Economy announced that France “is organizing with other European countries to show the danger” of a pact that, according to Armand, contains “totally unfavorable and unfair conditions, especially regarding the arrival of beef ” to the community market.
Paris has gone out of its way to convince Belgium, Austria, Ireland, Bulgaria and Italy not to go ahead.
After two decades of negotiation, the EU and Mercosur closed the trade agreement in 2019, but since then it has not been able to be ratified because both blocs are negotiating new environmental commitments demanded by EU countries.
The two blocs hold monthly negotiations at a technical level and between now and the end of the year they will have the opportunity to address it at the highest political level.
First at the summit of G20which will be held in Brazil on November 18 and 19; and then in the Mercosurscheduled for December.
(With information from EFE)
