Milwaukee, Oct 1 (IANS): Brazil and the United States are moving closer towards a trade agreement and will work in the coming weeks to define the scope of negotiations, including tariffs, non-tariff barriers, quotas and safeguards, a senior Brazilian minister has said.
Brazil’s Minister of Development, Industry, Trade and Services Márcio Elias Rosa said he held a “good meeting” with US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer on the sidelines of the G20 Trade Ministers’ Meeting here.
“We spoke about the possibility of an agreement. We renewed the commitment to having an agreement,” Rosa said through an interpreter during an impromptu gaggle.
“Greer is interested in building this agreement,” he said.
Rosa said the immediate task was to determine what would fall within the negotiations.
“In the coming weeks, we are going to define a conceptual scope of such trade agreements, which can talk about tariff or non-tariff issues,” he said.
The Brazilian side, he added, had never lacked willingness to negotiate.
Rosa said negotiations had resumed following direct engagement between the presidents of the two countries after tariffs affected Brazil’s economy.
The two sides subsequently held talks, including a second in-person meeting during the G20 gathering in Milwaukee, he said.
The difficult part now was determining the boundaries of a potential agreement.
“All of you know the difficulties in defining the boundaries or limits. What will be up for negotiation? Otherwise, it will be endless,” Rosa said.
“If we were to list all goods and services, it would be months or years,” he added.
The two sides would therefore have to identify sectors and thresholds and determine the mechanisms that could form part of an agreement.
“Are we going to talk about quotas? Are we going to talk about tariff reduction? Are we going to include safeguards?” Rosa said.
He said he saw willingness on Greer’s part to advance that work.
“We saw in the face of Ambassador Greer a willingness to do that, and so we will do that. We’re closer by the day,” Rosa said.
Rosa also made clear that Brazil continued to oppose the use of tariffs as instruments of coercion or discrimination and believed the WTO should provide universal rules for international commerce. At the same time, he stressed that Brasilia remained committed to negotiations.
“The Brazilian government is never away from the negotiation table for one reason. Because Brazil believes in multilateralism,” he said.
Brazil and the United States have a broad commercial relationship spanning agriculture, energy, manufacturing and services. Trade tensions have added urgency to efforts by the two governments to find a negotiated framework for addressing tariff and market-access disputes.
The Milwaukee talks took place alongside wider G20 discussions on multilateral trade rules, food security, excess capacity and WTO reform, with Brazil arguing for stronger universal rules governing international commerce.
