US and Mexican negotiators will continue meeting through the weekend to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and Canada is set to rejoin the talks as soon as it is called, Mexican Secretary of Economy Ildefonso Guajardo said on Friday.
Guajardo and Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Luis Videgaray have been shuttling back and forth to Washington for more than a month for meetings with US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to try to iron out bilateral issues, such as rules for the auto market, before the end of this month.
However, Guajardo told reporters that Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland was ready at any point to proceed with the NAFTA negotiations.
Photo: AFP
“I have confirmation that she would be available the moment we believe we can enter into the trilateral” discussions, he said.
Freeland said that Canada would rejoin the talks once the bilateral discussions concluded.
“Once the bilateral issues get resolved, Canada will be joining the talks to work on both bilateral issues and our trilateral issues,” Freeland told reporters. “And [it] will be happy to do that, once the bilateral US-Mexico issues have been resolved.”
However, Freeland is to travel to Europe from Aug. 26 to Aug. 30 for visits in Germany, France and Ukraine, her office said.
Guajardo declined to go into detail on the topics remaining with the US, but said that an agreement could be reached at any time.
“The idea is that we are staying because we know there are issues to resolve,” Guajardo said. “And we have to make sure that everybody feels comfortable with this agreement.”
Earlier in the day, Guajardo said that officials were “very far” along in efforts to deal with the Mexico-US issues, but added: “There are trilateral issues that have to be solved in a trilateral context.”
A contentious proposal by the US — which would require the nearly 25-year-old trade pact to be reauthorized every five years — must include all three partners, Guajardo said.
Jesus Seade, an economic advisor to Mexican president-elect Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador who has been participating in portions of the NAFTA talks, said that the sunset clause “is going out,” news reports from Mexico City said.
Guajardo declined to comment on Seade’s remarks, but said that the teams are working together on behalf of Mexico.
A senior Canadian official on Thursday told reporters there had been “no indication of flexibility from the US on this issue.”
The three countries have been negotiating for a year to salvage the trade pact that US President Donald Trump has said has been a “disaster” for the US.
Additional reporting by Reuters
PERSISTENT RUMORS: Nvidia’s CEO said the firm is not in talks to sell AI chips to China, but he would welcome a change in US policy barring the activity Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said his company is not in discussions to sell its Blackwell artificial intelligence (AI) chips to Chinese firms, waving off speculation it is trying to engineer a return to the world’s largest semiconductor market. Huang, who arrived in Taiwan yesterday ahead of meetings with longtime partner Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), took the opportunity to clarify recent comments about the US-China AI race. The Nvidia head caused a stir in an interview this week with the Financial Times, in which he was quoted as saying “China will win” the AI race. Huang yesterday said
Nissan Motor Co has agreed to sell its global headquarters in Yokohama for ￥97 billion (US$630 million) to a group sponsored by Taiwanese autoparts maker Minth Group (敏實集團), as the struggling automaker seeks to shore up its financial position. The acquisition is led by a special purchase company managed by KJR Management Ltd, a Japanese real-estate unit of private equity giant KKR & Co, people familiar with the matter said. KJR said it would act as asset manager together with Mizuho Real Estate Management Co. Nissan is undergoing a broad cost-cutting campaign by eliminating jobs and shuttering plants as it grapples
The Chinese government has issued guidance requiring new data center projects that have received any state funds to only use domestically made artificial intelligence (AI) chips, two sources familiar with the matter told Reuters. In recent weeks, Chinese regulatory authorities have ordered such data centers that are less than 30 percent complete to remove all installed foreign chips, or cancel plans to purchase them, while projects in a more advanced stage would be decided on a case-by-case basis, the sources said. The move could represent one of China’s most aggressive steps yet to eliminate foreign technology from its critical infrastructure amid a
MORE WEIGHT: The national weighting was raised in one index while holding steady in two others, while several companies rose or fell in prominence MSCI Inc, a global index provider, has raised Taiwan’s weighting in one of its major indices and left the country’s weighting unchanged in two other indices after a regular index review. In a statement released on Thursday, MSCI said it has upgraded Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country World Index by 0.02 percentage points to 2.25 percent, while maintaining the weighting in the MSCI Emerging Markets Index, the most closely watched by foreign institutional investors, at 20.46 percent. Additionally, the index provider has left Taiwan’s weighting in the MSCI All-Country Asia ex-Japan Index unchanged at 23.15 percent. The latest index adjustments are to
RSS