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Interview: International trade expert Elvire Fabry 

Sion: The trend of moving parts of a business back home or closer to home is on the rise. To understand this trend better, Business Spotlight spoke to Elvire Fabry, a senior research fellow at the Jacques Delors Institute and rapporteur of a working group on EU–China relations. A “rapporteur” is a person hired to make and present reports based on meetings.

In her career, Fabry focuses on European trade policy. But she has also worked on transatlantic trade relations, World Trade Organization reform, the international trade implications of Brexit and the European Economic Security Strategy.

Fabry spoke about “excessive dependencies”, a term which refers to an over-reliance on a system, a country, a person or a company. Listen carefully to this extract because I’ll test your understanding of it afterwards.

Elvire: Since Covid, the whole world has -focused much more on reducing excessive dependencies, which means, first of all, identifying them — notably, all the dependencies that we have on critical minerals imported and the Chinese capacity to refine those minerals — the extraction, but most of all, the refining. There were other, additional goods that were well identified by the European Commission, which had launched some assessments in the critical sector of minerals in 2008, which was expanded to all the imported products. In 2021, it ended with an assessment, where we had -excessive dependencies corresponding to six per cent of the value of goods imported. And, of course, a big share of those were coming from China.

I have an example, too. I have [non-standard] to ask for a phone, because my team was in [an]other city. I was working and living in Frankfurt, but they were in Magdeburg. And in Colombia, you have to take care when you ask for those things because you are asking your boss. And hierarchies there are more visible. And I -remember that I was writing the email asking for the phone, and I was doing that in German, but I think the way I wrote it, it was too Colombian, or like the Spanish, like, “I wish you a good day. I was wondering if there is any possibility to have blah, blah...” I wrote [a] super long thing, and then at the end, I just asked to have a phone. And the answer of my boss at that time was really funny. He just told me, like, “OK, Carlos. You can have it. But could you be more direct? You just have to ask.” And somehow I like that, because I think that makes the whole thing way more efficient.