HC Deb 22 May 1991 vol 191 c924
13. Mr. Dickens

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs what progress is being made in the dialogue between the European Community and Latin America.

Mr. Garel-Jones

This dialogue has been strengthened by the ministerial level discussions that the European Community held with the countries of central America in Managua on 18 and 19 March and with the Rio group in Luxembourg on 26 and 27 April.

Mr. Dickens

So that we get the British sales teams cracking in Latin America, will my hon. Friend outline to the House some of the commercial opportunities available to British sales forces?

Mr. Garel-Jones

The prospects for British exporters in the Latin American continent are very great—the more so now that countries there are fully open to democracy and are pursuing proper market policies. Latin America is a very promising market with 422 million people and a gross domestic product in 1989 of $840 billion. It offers substantial opportunities for British exporters who, in 1990, increased their penetration there by 16 per cent.

Dr. Kim Howells

Does the Minister agree that the self-sufficiency, indeed the very nature of much of the farming in South America, is being destroyed by the lure of easy loot from the common agricultural policy to provide feedstocks for the beef and butter mountains in Europe and that it is causing a dramatic and detrimental change to much local agriculture in South America?

Mr. Garel-Jones

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. One of the most crucial issues facing Latin America at the moment is a successful outcome to the Uruguay round—an outcome which opens up European markets to the agricultural products of Latin America. That is an outcome for which Britain is pressing very strongly indeed.

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