Ireland will not oppose a trade deal with the South American Mercosur bloc as long as there is no reopening of beef quotas, Enterprise Minister Simon Coveney has said.

As negotiations enter what could be their final phase, Mr Coveney said Ireland’s red line was a deal on tariff-free beef imports from the bloc agreed in 2019, alongside extra commitments from Mercosur countries on deforestation and labour standards.

“Ireland’s view, in terms of a Mercosur deal, is that there is no substantial change to the text in the context of our defensive interests around agricultural quotas and so on, and that there are very clear commitments, from a sustainability and climate perspective, from the Mercosur group of countries, that reassure the EU,” Mr Coveney said on the fringes of a meeting of the EU’s 27 trade ministers. “Let’s wait and see whether that is possible.”

His comments come as hopes of a deal with the Mercosur bloc – Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay – have been ramping up after more than two decades of stops and starts.

Negotiators, who have been meeting round the clock for the last number of weeks, now believe there is a less than two-week window to seal a deal pending a changeover of leadership at Mercosur level and in Mercosur member Argentina in early December.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen is due to meet Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva at the UN climate summit in Dubai this week, where officials believe a deal could be finalised, despite Argentina’s president-elect Javier Milei threatening to pull Argentina out of the Mercosur bloc during his election campaign.

“We are closer than we’ve ever been to closing this additional file, which is an excellent set of circumstances to reach a balanced agreement,” said Spanish trade minister Xiana Margarida Mendez Bertolo, who chaired a trade ministerial in Brussels.

She said there were “not very many technical issues and very few red lines” left to work out.

Spain, an avid supporter of the Mercosur deal, currently holds the EU’s rotating presidency.

European Commission vice-president Valdis Dombrovskis, who is the bloc’s top trade negotiator, said the talks were “quite advanced” and that the two sides were discussing some “targeted asks” from the Mercosur countries.

Technical negotiations are ripe for a final political push

There is no indication that the asks include anything on beef quotas, but appear to be focused on climate commitments and other specific issues.

“Negotiations were concluded several years ago, and from the Commission’s side we are always, so to say, cautioning against wide reopening of the agreement,” Mr Dombrovskis said.

“All in all, I would say the scope of negotiations is still quite contained, so one can say that, indeed, technical negotiations are ripe for a final political push.”

Talks first began on what would be the EU’s single biggest trade deal 23 years ago. A deal was signed in 2019 but has never been enacted, after facing political and popular opposition. Irish farmers say the 2019 deal will have a disproportionate impact on them.

Reporting On:www.independent.ie