Brussels, 07/12/2012 (Agence Europe) - Buenos Aires has outstripped Brussels' and Washington's formal complaint against its import restrictions by lodging a complaint earlier in the week against obstacles to the entry of its biodiesel into Spain, and against its lemons and meat into the United States.
The difference in opinion with regard to trade between Argentina and the EU, the United States and Japan has hardened this week with successive calls for arbitration at the WTO against measures that are considered protectionist. This is a conflict which illustrates the economic tension between developed powers that are in search of a second wind on world markets, and emerging nations that are putting up fierce competition by sometimes depending on a State capitalism that in certain Latin American countries has given rise to expropriations of Spanish companies - the oil company Repsol in Argentina last April (which stirred up a hornet's nest in the current conflict with the EU - see EUROPE 10596, 10600, 10601, 10610, 10621), the electrical company Red Electrica in Bolivia (see EUROPE 10606) - and western companies in Venezuela (see EUROPE 10669).
Before the complaint lodged by the EU, the USA and Japan at the WTO on 6 December, which targeted the list of import licences and costly approval procedures imposed by Buenos Aires on hundreds of imported products (see EUROPE 10746), Argentina made the first move by lodging an official complaint against the EU the previous day - a complaint relating to the blocking of Argentina's biodiesel exports to Spain (see EUROPE 10672) - and against the USA for blocking Argentina's export of lemons and meat.
According to a specialist from the economic media Abeceb, quoted by AFP, Argentina wants to control the current low of its trade surplus, which lies largely in its exports of agricultural products and raw materials. Buenos Aires, which has already faced a capital leak, finds its only source of financing in its trade surplus - in the absence of credit since the payment default on its debt in 2001. In 2012 Argentina has thus generalised its restrictions on imports which were more specific in 2011. Abeceb also mentions measures obliging foreign companies to import Argentinian products or to invest in the country in order not to risk seeing their products blocked at Argentinian customs.
Argentina's president, Cristina Kirchner, contests the accusations of protectionism. “It's as if there was a legal protectionism - that of the developed countries, and a populist protectionism - that of the emerging countries”, she said recently. (EH/transl.fl)