Argentina wants the European Union to make more concessions to the four-nation Mercosur trading bloc in order to create a free-trade area spanning South America and Europe, Argentina's Agriculture Minister Miguel Campos said Wednesday.
An offer put on the table by Brussels last Friday was "a starting point, a minimum, which must be improved," the minister told AFP.
"The European proposal still seems poor to us, but that does not mean we are turning it down," Campos said on the sidelines of a World Trade Organisation (WTO) meeting in Geneva.
"The positive thing is that the European Union is sending Mercosur a signal that there is leeway for better access to our exports," the minister added.
The EU needed to give more details on the extent to which it was offering access for finished products from the Mercosur countries -- Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
The Argentine minister said it was likely that the two sides would use the EU-Latin America summit in Guadalajara, Mexico beginning on Friday to reaffirm a target date of October for an agreement on agriculture.
On Tuesday, EU trade commissioner Pascal Lamy said final negotiations with Mercosur could not yet move forward because he was not sure if the South American offer matched the EU one.
Campos said an agreement between Mercosur and the EU could help spur talks on setting up a pan-American Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA).
Those talks are held up by persistent disagreement between the United States and Mercosur, mainly over US agriculture subsidies.Agence France Presse:
