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The European Union and South America’s Mercosur trade bloc could sign a free trade agreement (FTA) at the annual Europe-Latin America summit this spring, Brazilian foreign minister Celso Amorim said this week. The two sides launched talks on a bilateral free trade agreement in 1999, but disagreements on agriculture and other issues and an effort to focus on the long-running Doha Round have stalled the negotiations for the past several years. Amorim expressed confidence, however, that a way forward can be found at the May 15-19 meeting in Madrid, Spain “I don’t know if it will be a final agreement,” an AFP article quoted him as saying, “but I think we can sign an agreement that is not simply a political declaration.”

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) reports that U.S. and East African trade and development officials met in Uganda Feb. 16 for their first meeting under the Trade and Investment Framework Agreement between the U.S. and the East African Community. The TIFA provides a forum for advancing cooperation on trade and investment issues between the U.S. and the five EAC member states of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.
According to a USTR press release, officials at this week’s meeting examined U.S. and EAC work on implementation of the African Growth and Opportunity Act and issues related to market access, trade capacity building, the financial sector, agricultural trade and the business environment. Officials also adopted a common plan of work that the two sides will jointly undertake in order to implement the TIFA.
USTR notes that total two-way trade between the EAC and the U.S. was valued at $1.4 billion in 2009, a 13.6% increase over 2008. U.S. imports from the EAC under AGOA, however, dropped 19% to $210.7 million. The leading U.S. exports to the EAC are aircraft, machinery, vegetables, grains and communications equipment. U.S. imports from the EAC include apparel, coffee, tea and cashews.

The workers had planned an all-out strike for this past Friday that would have put a halt to all imports and exports, but were forced to reschedule by the Finnish Minister of Labour. The union said that the labor minister has, acting within the scope of her authority, postponed the beginning of the dock strike by two weeks. But it also underlined that if an agreement cannot be reached, the strike will being March 3.

Dockers at Ireland’s busiest container terminal will go back on strike on February 22, after negotiations over redundancies and working conditions broke down. The previous strike, over the same issues, began last July, lasted 111 days and only ended after a resolution was brokered by the Irish Labor Court.

LW Daily reports that the level of world trade grew significantly in the latter part of 2009, according to first edition of Capgemini’s Global Trade Flow Index. The Index tracks trade by quarter for the 23 biggest players in world trade. The figures show that global trade levels grew by 8.5 per cent during the third quarter of 2009, with the main driver being stabilisation in developed markets (which still showed a decrease during the previous quarter) while emerging markets continued to grow. 
“Global trade flows have clearly been picking up across the world in late 2009, which is a clear indicator that most world economies are recovering from the economic recession,” said Capgemini Consulting. “Since global trade developments are typically an early indicator for the growth of the economy as a whole, we would expect to see GDP growth picking up as a result in most countries during Q1 and Q2 of 2010.”
The biggest increases in trade were seen in the US, where total trade grew by 8.6 per cent, against a fall of 2.4 per cent the previous quarter, with trade benefiting from the weak dollar. Stabilisation in consumption and investment, in combination with recovering exports and declining imports, has also put European economies on the road to recovery, with the biggest growth in global trade seen in Germany (8.6 per cent), France (8.5 per cent), the UK (7.7 per cent) and the Netherlands (7.4 per cent).
BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies also witnessed a significant growth of 7.52 per cent in trade in Q3 2009, as government liberalization initiatives and infrastructure investments were put in place. China, in particular, witnessed positive trade growth of 6.5 per cent on account of aggressive macroeconomic stimulus measures, alongside other tax cuts and consumer subsidies which helped boost domestic demand. In addition to China, India and Russia, which have seen 12.1 per cent and 11.5 per cent growth in total trade respectively, have seen a significant improvement in their position in the Index since before the recession, driven by effective government stimulus packages.