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Chilean far-left President Gabriel Boric defended on Thursday the need to limit economic dependence on China during an encounter with representatives of French business.
China is Chile’s top trade partner, accounting for 40 percent of Chilean exports, as a result of years of prior presidents inviting Chinese communist investment into the country.
Boric was invited by the Movement of the Enterprises of France (MEDEF) to participate in a conference titled “Chile, Solutions for the Energy Transition,” during which the far-left president asserted that countries need to diversify their exports to limit their dependence on great powers, using Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine as an example.
“Dependence must be limited at a time when Russia’s cruel, unjust, and illegal invasion of Ukraine showed the fragility of depending mainly on a single source, in this case energy,” he said.
“It also happens to us in some way,” he continued. “Today, in another sense, 40 percent of our exports are to China. Today China is our main trading partner, we have good relations with China and it is one of the main investors in Latin America and South America, and increasingly so. But we also know that in the current geopolitical context it is necessary to diversify our sources of income and the destinations of our products.”
Chile’s Central Bank reported in February that China accounted for 39.4 percent of Chile’s total exports during 2022, totaling $38.44 billion, followed by the United States with 19.3 percent. Chilean exports to the U.S. totaled $13.58 billion during 2022.
Chile’s main exports to China are minerals such as copper and lithium, both indispensable in the manufacturing of electric vehicles. Non-mineral exports to China include fruits such as cherries and grapes, wine, and seafood.
Chile, which houses two of the world’s largest copper mines, was the world’s top producer of the mineral in 2022, responsible for 27 percent of all global copper production.
