Uruguay's Deputy Tourism Minister Lilian Kechiciahn revealed that in the first fortnight of 2007 the number of Argentine tourists traveling to Uruguay dropped 20% compared to a year ago, mainly because of the ongoing controversy over the construction of the Finnish Botnia-Orion pulp mill.
Brazil's government controlled oil corporation Petrobrás announced this week the start of natural gas production offshore the state of Bahia, which should increase supply in the northeast of the country helping to reduce the strong dependency from Bolivia.
A few hours before the Mercosur summit in Brazil, Uruguayan president Tabare Vazquez discarded Wednesday a meeting with his Argentine counterpart Nestor Kirchner to discuss the pulp mills dispute and insisted on the lifting of bridge blockades before any negotiation can begin.
The number of tourists coming to Chile as passengers on cruise ships is expected to grow by five percent in 2007, according to Destination Management Chile, which handles 70 percent of all tours and sightseeing trips involving cruise passengers.
Finland's Botnia is willing to sit and discuss with Argentina and Uruguay a negotiated solution to the controversy over the building of a pull mill in Uruguay which Argentina argues will be highly contaminating.
The head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) proposed Tuesday the convening of a global summit backed by the UN to plan a future course of action for tackling the cross-cutting problem.
China is willing to invest billons of US dollars in Latinamerica to ensure the supply of natural resources but the region's leaders are wrong if they believe that ideological similarities guarantee a long cooperation since the interest of Beijing is opportunity, according to the Hong Kong based China Economic Review.
Ecuadorian new authorities are in contact with the team that successfully negotiated the restructuring of Argentina's foreign debt with the purpose of undertaking a similar process and significantly reduce the burden of the country's financial commitments.
An agenda with several controversial issues awaits Mercosur summit this week in Rio do Janeiro where some in fighting can also be expected given the level of criticism to which the trade group has been exposed.
By UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett (*)
It's one of my personal priorities as Foreign Secretary to get out and speak more to the business community. I simply don't think that it is possible to operate a successful foreign policy without working as closely as I can with the people who hold most of the global economic levers.