Breaking news November 15th at 8pm
While Donald Trumpthe new thundering Jupiter, during his electoral campaign promised to hurl fulminating tariffs against Chinese and European goods in order to put foreign accounts back on track and reindustrialise the United States, on the other side of the Atlantic they are trying to exploit this neo-isolationist tendency to strike a major free trade agreement with the Mercosurusing the G20 meeting to be held in Brazil, scheduled for Rio de Janeiro next November 18-19.
L’European Union it would thus emerge from the American geopolitical grip that tightens it against the Russia and reduces its room for maneuver towards China and would exploit to its advantage the harshness that Trump has once again expressed towards China Mexicowhich not only allows illegal immigrants to pass freely by the tens of thousands but which would have made agreements with Chinese industries that would set up on that territory to evade duties.
With this move, Europe would offer a political support to the Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silvawhich knows that the new American administration does not like it at all, and would also give breathing space to the Argentine president Javier Miley who needs to give a solid perspective to his country’s international relations after having dropped the membership of the Brics group that had been requested by his predecessor.
The unsolved knot
This time too there is an unresolved issue in the European project of becoming the first commercial partner of the Latin American continent, as it has represented and still represents it with regards to the opening already made towards Canada, which has always had relations privileged with the USA: the unresolved issue that motivated it stall of the negotiations with Mercosur which have been going on for a decade, and which is represented by the prospect of the abolition of duties on agricultural products but above all on meat, derives from the inability of the EU to preliminarily find within itself an adequate solution regarding common agricultural policy: this is the stumbling block that is causing great alarm french governmentwhich is ready to block the agreement again given that, in the current political and economic conditions, it could not withstand a new outbreak of protests by farmers and breeders.
Instead there is the mute in Italiaalso because the best personal and industrial relations are rewarded, with two of the largest Mercosur countries, Brazil and Argentina, which were the destination of our historical emigration: the farmers and breeders’ organizations are protesting. Also for the Germaniawhich has also experienced migratory flows towards South America, even if more limited, as for Italy, the prospective advantages of the agreement would outweigh the immediate damages.
Above all, we need to reverse the recent process that led to deindustrialization of countries like Argentina and Brazil, which have staked everything on extensive agriculture to export to China, beating American competition penalized by retaliatory duties, thus returning back to the socio-economic configuration of the early twentieth century. The progressive deforestation of Brazil is the rotten fruit of this recent configuration of geoeconomic and geopolitical balances.
The large estate
There exists, especially in Europe, a historic structural imbalance between the value of agricultural production to international prices and the minimum incomes necessary to continue activity in the countryside and avoid the progressive abandonment of the land and above all the depopulation of rural areas which causes such serious damage to the governance of the territory.
The productivity of the latifundia characteristic of agriculture in Latin America is incomparable compared to that of the small peasant property which was the result of many actions of agrarian reform adopted especially in Italy until the 1950s: we cannot open our arms just because those who live isolated will pay. The worst solution is to close your eyes once again. (reproduction reserved)
