The Secretary of Economy, Ildefonso Guajardo Villarreal, participated in the commemorative event "The Free Trade Agreement EU-Mexico 15 years after its signature", organized by the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations (COMEXI, by its initials in Spanish).

The Secretary of Economy, said that "in this decade and a half, it was achieved a diversified platform for attracting foreign investment; so that, today, Europe represents more than one third of the total foreign investment in the country".

However, he said that the Agreement should respond to the current situation and the conditions in the international markets, where there are new phenomena that must be addressed: the growing participation of emerging economies in the worldwide trade, the creation of value chains in different regions of the world, the growing importance of services, the high manufacturing processes and the trade diversification that Mexico and the European Union (EU) have developed.

Another argument that the Secretary Ildefonso Guajardo pointed out, to renegotiate the Agreement are the negotiations that the EU recently concluded with Canada and those are currently opened with the United States, which will help to obtain a convergence in the trade regimes on both sides of the Atlantic.

He stressed that a fundamental element in this exercise of modernizing the EU-Mexico Free Trade Agreement is the personal interest and leadership of President Enrique Peña Nieto, who has developed an excellent relationship with several European leaders, which has been vital for negotiating the Joint Vision Report, where the terms of reference of the negotiation were established.

The Head of the Secretariat of Economy agreed with his EU counterpart, Cecilia Malmström, to work so the negotiations for the modernization of the Agreement begin in early 2016.

Under this Agreement, Mexico and the EU multiplied their bilateral trade by three. The European Union has positioned itself as the third largest trading partner of Mexico in the world.

Mexican exports to this region grew from only 5.5 billion dollars in 1999, exporting over 20 billion dollars in 2014; that is to say, they were quadrupled in just 15 years. In the same period, imports from the EU tripled to reach 44.5 billion dollars in 2014. For the European Union, they represent a quarter (25.2%) of its exports to Latin America.