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Ideal-ist – your worldwide ICT Support Network
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BACKGROUND INFORMATION
“The strategic partnership of the European Union with Latin America and the Caribbean is a very important and ambitious one in the European Union’s external relations.”
The above statement begins the overview of the section of the European Commission’s web portal devoted to the EU’s relations with Latin America. This section is developed by the Directorate General External Relations of the European Commission and provides a large amount of information on past and present initiatives to strengthen relations between the European and Latin American countries.
President Barroso addressing Heads of State during the 4th EU-LAC Summit in Vienna on May 2006
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The EU’s relations with Latin American countries have developed at the bi-regional level (European Union-Latin America), and several focused dialogues within this broader relationship are maintained with specific sub-regions (the Mercosur, Andean Community, and Central America), and between the EU and specific countries (Mexico and Chile), with which the EU has signed Association Agreements.
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Official EC policy documents, providing ample information about the cooperation framework between Europe and LatAm countries for the 2007-2013 period can be downloadable from the European commission’s website:
Cooperation on ICT research
All the above mentioned initiatives, together with the Science & Technology Agreements signed by the European Commission with Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico - thus providing a better framework for R&D cooperation - have allowed already to reach significant results. In the past years R&D cooperation between European and Latin American organisations in the ICT area have indeed shown an important development, namely in the framework of EU-funded programmes: organisations from Latin America are quite well represented, with nearly 50 organisations involved in FP6 IST projects, representing over 10% of the total third countries organisations involved in such projects.
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Participation of organisations from third countries in FP6 IST projects - Final statistics (clic to enlarge)
Source DG Infso 2007
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Detailed information on FP6 and FP7 R&D projects, and in particular on projects, in the ICT field, with the participation of Latin American organisations, can be found on the CORDIS website.
To keep strengthening the cooperation between Europe and Latin America, two FP6 IST support actions have been launched to promote EU-Latin America ICT research cooperation:
- The WINDS-LA project, focusing on cooperation with Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and the Caribbean region.
- The SOLAR-ICT project, focusing on cooperation with Costa Rica, Guatemala, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay.
GEANT2 interconnections with ALICE |
To be also noted: in the context of the @LIS (ALliance for the Information Society) Programme, launched by the European Commission in 2002, major progress has been made in the creation of a Latin-American intra-regional broadband research and education networking infrastructure. |
@LIS is connected to the Framework GEANT2 network (the fastest broadband research network interconnecting European countries, co-financed under the Framework Programme) since August 2004. |
Cooperation in the Networked and Electronic Media field
Despite the undisputable results of the EU-LatAm cooperation initiatives in the ICT domain, it appears that R&D cooperation in the field of networked and electronic media has remained quite low: among the projects involving LatAm organisations, very few do address the Networked and Electronic Media field, a sector of high potential for EU-LatAm strategic cooperation, thus making fully relevant the decision of the European Commission to support the SALA+ project.
A searchable database of cooperation initaitives surveyed during the SALA+ project lifetime is accessible to all interested parties here.
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