Brazil and Mexico End Automotive Sector Battle Adam Thomson and Joe Leahy - The Globe and Mail
go to original March 16, 2012

Mexico and Brazil have settled a spat over the automotive sector, with Mexico agreeing to cut future car exports in return for keeping alive a decade-old trade treaty with Latin America’s largest economy.

The agreement, under which Mexico will slash average annual exports to Brazil to $1.55-billion (U.S.) for three years, ends a tense month-long dispute between Latin America’s two largest economies.

In February, Brazil said it was considering ending a 2002 treaty, which gives the two countries preferential access to each other’s car markets. Brazil raised the possibility after imports of Mexican cars jumped more than 30 per cent to $1.7-billion, according to Mexican figures.

The threat was the latest in a series of moves by Brazil to protect domestic industry from a rising tide of imports.

Brazil has in recent weeks reignited its “currency war” – as it calls its efforts to stem the appreciation of its currency, the real, against the dollar – and taken a string of trade-related measures in a bid to revive its flagging industry.

Industrial production slipped a much worse-than-expected 2.1 per cent in January compared with December, with part of the fall driven by a 30.7-per-cent decline in automotive output.

While part of this was due to technical factors in the truck industry, automotive production has been consistently weaker since the middle of last year as producers have struggled with rising imports, particularly from Asia but also from Mexico.

Mexico is keen to retain its front seat position in Brazil, which in 2010 overtook Germany as the world’s fourth-largest car market and is set to be bigger than Japan by 2015.

Some commentators criticized Thursday’s agreement, suggesting that Mexico had caved in to Brazilian demands. As part of the negotiation, Mexico also agreed that car manufacturers should increase the locally sourced content of vehicles from the current 30 per cent to 40 per cent during the next five years.

They also pointed out that for most of the life of the 2002 vehicle agreement, Brazil has been the net beneficiary, notching up many successive years of trade surpluses with Mexico.

Francisco de Rosenzweig, Mexico’s undersecretary of trade, said that Thursday’s outcome was positive and that his country had defended free trade in the region. “We will go back to free trade within three years,” he told the FT in an interview. “We managed to maintain a long-term agreement.”

He added that car manufacturers in Mexico were kept close to the talks throughout the negotiation. “We went hand-in-hand,” he said.

Global car manufacturers have announced billions of dollars in investment in Mexico in recent years. Mr. de Rosenzweig said that in some cases, including Mazda and Honda, those investments had been made with one eye on Mexico’s preferential access to Brazil.

Luis de la Calle, a respected Mexican economist and a negotiator of the North American free-trade agreement, said that Thursday’s settlement would preserve most of Mexico’s preferential treatment with Brazil.

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