SAO PAULO (Reuters) -Brazil’s finance minister said on Monday his country would not give up negotiating with the U.S. but acknowledged that a trade deal may fail to be reached by August 1, when President Donald Trump’s 50% tariffs on Brazilian goods are due to take effect.<\/p>\n
“That could happen,” Fernando Haddad told radio station CBN in an interview, saying Latin America’s largest economy was still awaiting a response from Washington on trade proposals initially submitted in May.<\/p>\n
Trump announced the steep tariffs earlier this month, citing what he called a “witch hunt” against former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who is on trial on charges of plotting a coup, and trade practices he said were unfair.<\/p>\n
Haddad said Brazil had contingency plans to deal with any potential tariffs, and could ultimately redirect more than half its current U.S. exports to other markets.<\/p>\n
“But that would take time,” he cautioned.<\/p>\n
The U.S. is a large buyer of Brazil’s oil, steel products, coffee, aircraft and orange juice, but runs a trade surplus with the South American country – a point Brazilian officials have used to label the threatened tariffs as unjustified.<\/p>\n
Companies such as planemaker Embraer, which has the U.S. as its main market, would be hard hit by Trump’s move.<\/p>\n
Haddad said the Brazilian government may need to support the sectors most affected by tariffs, but stressed that such measures would not necessarily incur larger primary spending.<\/p>\n
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has pledged to reciprocate like-for-like if tariffs take effect as promised, but Haddad on Monday said Brazil would not seek to punish U.S. companies operating in the country.<\/p>\n
“We cannot pay back in kind something that we consider unfair,” the minister said.<\/p>\n
(Reporting by Gabriel Araujo and Bernardo Caram; Editing by Sharon Singleton, Bernadette Baum and Dale Hudson)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SAO PAULO (Reuters) -Brazil’s finance minister said on Monday his country would not give up negotiating with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26596,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[941,28,101,23225,23227,942,969,23226],"class_list":["post-26595","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-brazil","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-fernando-haddad","tag-finance-minister","tag-president-donald-trump","tag-president-jair-bolsonaro","tag-trade-surplus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26595","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26595"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26595\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26596"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26595"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26595"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26595"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}