Brazil in talks with Canada to revive Mercosur trade deal
By Lisandra Paraguassu and Lucinda Elliott
Brazil Foreign Trade Secretary, Brasilia/Montevideo (Reuters) -Brazil’in South America’s Mercosur Bloc and Ottawa between the Mercosur Bloc and Ottawa to continue negotiations with Canada is dealing with a “constructive dialogue”, he said.
According to Brazil’s Foreign Trade Secretary Tatiana Prazares, Tatiana Prazeres, who shared the details of the visit to Reuters this week, will visit Brazil in late August.
Canada, in the midst of uncertainties caused by the tariffs brought from the United States, as part of a wider coercion to diversify trade from the United States, said the interest in restarting talks with Mercosur last month. President Donald Trump.
Both Canada and Brazilian resources told Reuters that Canada’s International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu is expected to go to Brasilia on August 25th.
Mercosur, which contains Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, is a large exporter of beef, soybeans and minerals.
Sidhu’s visit “will be an opportunity to evaluate the conditions for the restart of negotiations in a possible way, Praz Prazeres said, although there is no official date to restart them. Since Trump’s radical policy shifts have focused on local issues such as elections before the South American countries have focused on local issues before they reset the trade agenda, negotiations have been standing since 2021.
Two high -level diplomatic sources said official negotiations could continue at the end of September or at the beginning of October.
The bilateral trade between the US and Canada was 727 billion dollars last year, while Canada’s trade with Brazil, the largest Mercosur economy, reached $ 9.1 billion and published $ 3.5 billion.
A source monitoring developments, both sides see the Mercosur-Canada agreement relatively unobstructed and expects the negotiations to last about a year, he said.
Prazares said that the official restart of negotiations, including a timeline setting for interviews, would be due to internal coordination within Mercosur.
“Mercosur is willing to evaluate the next steps.” He said.
Uruguay told Reuters, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, said that there were no “new steps” about Mercosur-Canada talks, but confirmed that the agreement remained on the block agenda.
The Argentina Ministry of Foreign Affairs refrained from commenting.
(Reporting by Lisandra Paraguassu in Brasilia in Montevideo, Lucinda Elliott. Additional reports by Maximilian Heath in Buenos Aires. Editing by Alexander Villegas and Toby Chopra)
