MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Mercosur summit next June

Mercosur's Common Market Group, GMC, currently convened in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, confirmed that the block's presidential summit would be held next June in this city.

Mercosur presidents regularly meet every six months with the rotation of the chair of the group, which as of next July will be handed by Paraguay to Uruguay.

The coming 17/18 June summit will be of particular importance since three of Mercosur member presidents will be officially meeting for the first time: Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who took office last January, plus the new leaders of Argentina and Paraguay, that will be elected in April.

The GMC agenda, (an executive body of negotiators at Deputy Minister level) includes ten issues with six points described as the "fundamental pillars for the redefinition of Mercosur".

The six pillars are macroeconomic co-ordination; common trade policy (external tariff); asymmetries; institutional strengthening; productive chain integration and border integration.

Other issues are trade disputes and tribunals; converting the Administrative Secretariat into a Technical Secretariat and relations with the European Union and the Free Trade of the Americas Association.

Following the January '99 devaluation of the Brazilian currency and the Argentine default of December 2001, Mercosur's early nineties dynamism disappeared and even threatened the continuity of the group