The Foreign Minister spoke this Wednesday during the CERA event, held at the Four Seasons Hotel “We have to keep in touch with the world. Closing ourselves off is a mistake. Countries that close themselves off become backward countries. Let us continue betting that Argentina will do better to the extent that it is linked to the world,” said Foreign Minister Jorge Faurie this Wednesday (14.08.2019), when participating in the opening of the Export Day event, organized by the Chamber of Exporters of the Argentine Republic -CERA-.
Before an auditorium packed with businessmen and representatives of the export sector, Faurie stated that "in some way, in the discussion that has been generated by the election results of Sunday, the vision of the country is at stake The challenge that lies ahead, and that the government of President Mauricio Macri has been carrying out throughout this time, is to keep the country connected to the world, to seek markets for what the country produces, because exports translate into work, and if there is work there are better conditions of well-being for the population.”
However, Faurie stressed that “One of the things that all Argentines agree on is, without a doubt, to persevere in order to continue exporting more and more.".
“Exporting more is the answer. The world has changed at a strategic, technological and leadership level. We have spent part of these last twenty years of changes looking at our navels while the world moved forward,” said the head of diplomacy, who was accompanied on the panel by the Minister of Agriculture, Luis Miguel Etchevehere; the Secretary of Foreign Trade, Marisa Bircher; and the President of CERA, Enrique Mantilla.
"We have opened 200 markets: meat to the US, China, Japan, Canada; and lemons to the US, Mexico, among other examples. "We have signed significant trade agreements, we have managed to reduce export costs, eliminate bureaucracy, and move forward in the digitalization of all administrative processes. The goal is to triple what we export within ten years," Faurie said.
Likewise, He highlighted the recent MERCOSUR – European Union agreement, as a great achievement in this regard. “Our products will enter a market of 500 million people, and it will put us in contact with 28% of the world's GDP. This will generate more employment, more competitiveness and more institutionality,” he said, and recalled other agreements that the bloc is working on: “In addition to the agreement with the EU, we have the work done with the EFTA, an agreement that can end this year; we have open negotiations with Canada that continue in the month of October and can end during the first half of 2020, and we have open negotiations with Singapore that can end at the end of next year.”
"Let us adapt the sectors that lack competitiveness, let us help so that these exports are possible, so that competition does not affect a particular sector. What we cannot do is have a closed economy," he concluded.
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