Washington, Apr 14 (EFE).- The Executive Vice President of the European Commission and Head of Trade, Valdis Dombrovskis, defended this Friday the signing of an “executive agreement” with the US government for trade in European minerals critical for the manufacture of electric vehicles.
Dombrovskis gave as an example the recent agreement signed between the Joe Biden Executive and the Japanese authorities for mineral trade, which was carried out at the executive level, that is, without the approval of Congress.
“We consider the agreement with Japan as a good basis for discussions, for negotiations, and of course we see no reason for the European Union (EU) to be treated worse,” the Latvian said during a press conference in Washington.
Last March, Biden and the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, agreed to start negotiating a trade pact on minerals to favor European companies that manufacture electric vehicles and establish a “transparent dialogue” on subsidies for green energies. .
The pact seeks to alleviate some of the tensions that have marked the transatlantic relationship in recent months after the approval in the US of the so-called Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which offers tax incentives to companies that build electric vehicles with components made in North America.
European companies, in principle, could not access these subsidies because the community bloc does not have a trade agreement with the US, but Washington and Brussels want to solve it, so they launched a working group to study the implementation of the wrath.
According to Dombrovskis, the group meets regularly and the talks are progressing, although they are “complicated”, so the bloc is considering its own response to the US law.
In this sense, the European Commission recently presented a plan to increase the production of clean technologies and energy in the European Union and to be able to compete with the huge subsidies that the United States or China offer to the sector.
Brussels proposes to facilitate subsidies to green industries, create a European fund to finance them, speed up permits and reduce bureaucracy, improve access to key raw materials and sign new trade agreements, among other actions.
“Of course, the EU and the US would be better off working together on the green and digital economy, and not against it,” said Dombrovskis, adding that China is a major player in the field, and the bloc is not He is interested in exchanging a dependency with Moscow, for natural gas, for another with Beijing.
