With a tailwind, the ruling party returns to the Senate this Thursday with the aim of approving the reform to the Glacier Law and the ratification of the trade agreement between the Mercosur and the European Union.
In the session, which began at 11, it is also planned to discuss the application of former national deputy Fernando Iglesias as Argentine ambassador to Belgium and the European Union.
On Friday at the same time, another session was called in the Upper House to discuss the labor reform projects and the juvenile penal regime, both coming from Deputies.
Mercosur-EU Agreement
The bi-regional agreement between Mercosur and the European Union was going to be discussed in Friday’s session of the Upper House, along with the juvenile penal regime and the labor reform project, but the Government ordered the timing to be brought forward.
The decision of the Casa Rosada is due to the fact that the Parliament of Uruguay accelerated the ratification process of the trade agreement and could approve it in the next few hours.
The Government of Javier Milei wants to be the first to approve the treaty because it senses that if it becomes the first trading partner it could access differential advantages and benefits with respect to other countries in the region that compete for the same goods markets.
The votes to approve it are assured and it is estimated that the Peronist interbloc led by José Mayans will vote divided as happened the previous week in the Chamber of Deputies.
The trade agreement between Mercosur and the European Union that was approved in the Chamber of Deputies was signed on January 17 in Asunción, within the framework of a ceremony that had the participation of President Javier Milei and his counterparts from Paraguay, Santiago Peña, and from Uruguay, Yamandú Orsi, and in which the president of Brazil, Lula da Silva, was absent.
Reform of the Glacier Law
The ruling party is entrusted to give the debate in the room on the reform of law 26,639 on Minimum Budgets for the Protection of Glaciers and the Periglacial Environment, but, at the last minute, the radicalism put on the table an alternative project from the UCR senators that does not give so much power to the provinces in determining the protected areas.
As Agencia Noticias Argentinas learned from parliamentary sources, the negotiations are intense and seek to find a solution so as not to frustrate the approval of the initiative (in whatever version) in this Thursday’s session.
The approval of this project is a commitment assumed by the Government with the governors of mountain provinces who are seeking a more dynamic and less rigid law than the one in force to unblock and multiply investments in mining and hydrocarbons.
In Peronism, which would mostly lean towards rejection, there could be leaks since the position that former governors of mining provinces such as Lucía Corpacci (Catamarca) and Sergio Uñac (San Juan) could take is uncertain, to take some examples.
Both the Executive Branch project and the UCR alternative seek to redefine the scope of protected zones to allow economic exploitation in certain periglacial areas that are currently shielded and disabled for extractive and industrial activities.
The current regulations, which date back to 2010, It protects both visible glaciers and periglacial formations that are made up of a mixture of frozen soils of fresh water, rock and sediments..
They are very cold high mountain ecosystems, freshwater reservoirs usually close to glaciers, which are characterized by having frozen or water-saturated soils and play an important role in regulating the water and geomorphological balance. With the proposed modification, all that balance is put at risk.
The main difference between the Government project and that of the UCR is that the former transfers to the provinces the power to determine which areas to protect (because they constitute strategic reserves of water resources, biodiversity or scientific value) and which not, and they are empowered to propose modifications to the National Glacier Inventory (after an environmental evaluation report); while the UCR initiative gives total power to IANIGLA.
The Government’s position in favor of giving control and regulation powers to the provinces over minerals and hydrocarbons is based on article 124 of the National Constitution incorporated in the 1994 reform that recognizes the original domain of the jurisdictions of natural resources below the ground.
If the initiative is vigorously defended by the mining and hydrocarbon provinces of the mountain range, with the same intensity it arouses staunch rejection from environmentalist assemblies and also from the Church, which made its discontent with the progress of the project known through a letter from the Argentine Episcopal Commission.
The sectors that close ranks against the project warn that the protection of glaciers and periglacial zones, strategic pillars for the provision of fresh water for human consumption, sustainable agriculture and biodiversity, should not be negotiated against short-term sectoral corporate interests.
These organizations mobilized throughout the country denounce that the reform of the Glacier Law is an “unconstitutional environmental regression” because it violates the Escazú Agreement to which Argentina adhered; and they defend the current norm because it establishes a floor of protection for those particular ecosystems.
