
Trade with China for Argentina has great opportunities but also great threats because the Asian giant is only interested in produce with no added value, warned the head of Argentina’s Industrial Union, Ignacio De Mendiguren.

Paraguay is sounding the recently created Pacific Block made up of Colombia, Peru, Chile and Mexico with the possibility of considering applying to join it, revealed the country’s Foreign affairs minister Jose Fernandez Estigarribia.

Meat producers in Brazil's Mato Grosso do Sul state are lobbying the government to approve soy imports from neighbouring Bolivia after drought shrank supplies in the world's second grower, a state official and analysts.

The Paraguayan government had decided to appeal before the International Court of Justice in The Hague the suspension imposed on Paraguay by the governments of Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay as a sanction for the removal of Fernando Lugo as president of the country, last June 22.

Brazil is the only country that in the last ten years has benefited from Mercosur with an intra-zone trade surplus of 36.8 billion dollars while the other three full members, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay have accumulated huge deficits in the same period, according to Argentine economist Orlando Ferreres a regular columnist from La Nacion with graduate studies in Harvard.

The Uruguayan government said on Monday there will be no public statements on the latest “situations” with Argentina, and Uruguay will keep to what was agreed at presidential level during the last (31 July) Mercosur extraordinary meeting in Brasilia.

Argentina and Brazil will experience an economic slowdown this year compared to 2011, while Paraguay, punished by drought and an outbreak of foot and mouth disease, will have the worst performance in Latin America, and Peru the best, according to the Argentine consultants Ecolatina

Fernando Lugo said he would appeal to the Inter American Court the whole political impeachment process in the Senate that ended with his removal from the Paraguayan presidency in less than 48 hours and with little chance of a defence.

Former president Jorge Batlle (2000/2005) said that the inclusion of Venezuela in Mercosur “is favourable for Uruguay” but at the same time insisted it was “wrongly done” for not having taken into account Paraguay’s opposition currently suspended as member of the regional block.

Mercosur will officially begin negotiation with Mercosur for its inclusion as full member in September announced the Brazilian news agency, ABR on Sunday. The meeting is scheduled for September 15 when the incorporation preliminaries will be addressed.