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Uncertainty hinders foreign investment in Venezuela: WB
The political uncertainty in Venezuela will hamper investments, the local media quoted a
World Bank official as saying on Monday.
"Investors are preoccupied by the situation of Venezuela," Bernard Pasquer, director for Latin America and the Caribbean of the International Financial Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank (WB) told a press conference in Washington.
Whether or not there will be changes is not known and the investors are riding the fence, he added.
In the 2003 fiscal year due to conclude this month, the IFC participated in 54 projects in 16 Latin American and Caribbean countries and the total amount of the investments reached 2.18 billion US dollars.
However, Venezuela did not appear in the report presented by the IFC because there was only one 115-million-dollar operation last July for the petroleum sector that counted with the participation of Brazilian-Argentine consortium
PETROBRAS/Energy.
Venezuela faces a deep economic recession following a
two-month opposition-led strike which suspended oil exports of the world's fifth largest oil producer and slashed government revenues.
According to Pasquer, Brazil received the biggest volume of financing with 888.4 million dollars, followed by Colombia, 218 million; Mexico, 151 million; and Argentina, 120 million.
Bush, Putin to meet at Camp David on Sept. 26-27
US President George W. Bush will meet his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin at Camp David, Maryland, on Sept. 26-27, the White House said on Monday.
Speaking in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the US-Russian summit will "deepen their cooperation to deal with the shared challenges of the 21st century."
McClellan said Bush will also host Jordan's King Abdullah II this weekend at Camp David to discuss issues on the tattered Middle East peace process and Iraq.
France: Everyone loses with Cancun failure
France on Monday regretted that all parties lose in the failure of the WTO trade talks in Cancun, Mexico, after the five-day meeting ended without agreement.
"It is a failure for everyone and perhaps first of all for the poorest countries," said French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin at French radio France Info.
"We are glad to see the nations of the South organize themselves on a front that is both political and economic but it is regrettable that we did not reach an accord that would serve the whole of the international community," he said.
Earlier on Monday, European Union Commissioner for Trade
Pasca lLamy also said that all parties had emerged as losers from the failure of the global trade talks.
"There are only losers, in the same way that everyone would have emerged as a winner if we had been able to reach agreement
at Cancun," he told France Inter Radio.
"I am among those who believe that a controlled opening of international commerce is necessary in the fight for development and against poverty," he said.
"The fewer the rules, the greater the law of the jungle, and as we know in the jungle the tests of strength are brutal. The
big become bigger and the small smaller," he said.
The Cancun meeting, or the 5th Ministerial Meeting of the
World Trade Organization (WTO), failed to reach accord as disputes on the agricultural subsidies remained an obstacle for success.
The poor members denounced the rich ones for their spending of 300 billion US dollars in subsidies each year to protect their agricultural producers from cheap imports, and to allow them to export their products to regions whose agricultural producers do not count with such support.
Twenty-one developing countries formed a block and insisted on rejecting a "bad" agreement while the United States and Europe, who are facing an unprecedented pressure to show flexibility,
said they would open their markets if the G21 softens its demands.
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