In 2010, Ecuador ran a big trade deficit with Brazil: Ecuador’s exports to Brazil amounted to a paltry US$51.4m, while its imports came to US$853.8m. In the first five months of 2011, Ecuador’s exports to Brazil came to US$30.9m while US$397.9m of products went the other way. Patriota explained that Brazil was keen to reduce the trade asymmetry. Whether lifting the ban on bananas from Ecuador, the world’s biggest producer, will help in this regard is a moot point: Brazil is itself a massive producer.
Ecuador’s minister for strategic sectors, Jorge Glas, will travel to Brazil in late July to discuss possible Brazilian investment in some of the myriad infrastructure projects being planned by the administration of President Rafael Correa. Brazilian investment in Ecuador has slumped in recent years, as a diplomatic spat in 2008, involving the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht, left a bitter aftertaste: Correa expelled Odebrecht for substandard work on a hydro-electric project, San Francisco.
In November 2010 Ecuador also assumed the operations of Brazil’s state-owned oil giant Petrobras, which extracted 19,300 barrels per day of crude, after the company refused to accept the government’s new operating terms, which would have rendered them subcontractors. The Ecuadorean state is negotiating how much to pay for the assets of the company.
Patriota also made the intriguing announcement that Mercosur was keen to begin the process of reaching out to Bolivia and Ecuador to join the customs union as full members rather than just associates. This would set the seal on the fate of the floundering Andean Community (CAN), which is perpetually announcing a “re-launch”, although harmonising tariffs in the new-look Mercosur would be fraught with difficulty, not to mention winning approval from other member countries, notably Paraguay’s conservative congress.
Finally, Patriota said that Brazil intended to move ahead with its plans to construct the corridor scheme linking Ecuador’s port of Manta and Brazil’s Amazonian city of Manaus, which has foundered on financing and the inhospitable terrain around Manaus.
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