Thank you for the question.
I would like to give more details regarding the Buy American agreement with the United States, and with my criticism of it. The requirements that had blocked the negotiations in the mid-1990s were dropped. We wanted to get an exception to the American provision regarding purchases reserved to American small- and medium-sized enterprises and to companies owned by minority groups. This provision deprives us of 23% of the American market. It is for this very reason that we had not, in the 1990s, included purchases by provinces in the WTO Agreement on Government Procurement.
Now that we have yielded to the United States on that point, it will be very difficult not to accept the requests made by the European Union, that would like to get the same kind of access. In the 1990s, the European Union submitted the purchases of its member-states and of their sub-central units to the discipline of the Agreement on Government Procurement. They have been doing this for more than 15 years. We have not done it. Now, obviously, we will have to go ahead with it. I think it is almost unavoidable that there will eventually be an agreement on government procurement that also involves provincial procurement.