Move Over, China: Why India May Be the Better Partner for Latin America Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/10/17/move-over-china-why-in

Bolivia this month is accusing India's Jindal Steel & Power Ltd. of failing to honor its $2.1 billion investment commitment to develop the Mutún iron ore mine and smelting works. Jindal in turn claims Bolivia isn't providing it sufficient gas and electrical power to get the job done. Such disputes between Latin American governments and foreign multinationals, especially in the mining sector, are hardly new. But what's different today is that the tussles as well as the triumphs increasingly involve India – the emerging Asian power whose economic clout in Latin America could soon rival China's.

The Mutún discord notwithstanding, India's rise in Latin America and the Caribbean is a good thing for the region's development. As U.S. engagement in Latin America wanes, China's keeps growing: its bilateral trade from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego has soared 18-fold since 2000 to $166 billion in 2010, and in 2009 it became Brazil's largest commercial partner. According to the U.N., China's investment in Latin America topped $15 billion last year. But while that has helped fuel a Latin American boom, it's no secret that what Beijing wants most is commodities – almost all its imports from the region are raw materials like oil, copper and soybeans, and its investments almost always involve those products or the infrastructure to ship them – and what it seems to want least is to buy from or invest in Latin America's more important manufacturing sectors.

That's less the case with New Delhi. Granted, India and its 1 billion people crave Latin America's food and fuel as well. But its companies – which, not coincidentally, are largely of the private sector as opposed to China's, which are largely state firms – appear as interested in building enterprises in the region as they are in merely extracting minerals. Although India's bilateral trade with Latin America was seven times less than China's in 2010 at $23 billion, it still represents a ten-fold increase from 2000 and involves not just commodities but manufactured goods like regional jets from Brazil's Embraer S.A.

Read more: http://globalspin.blogs.time.com/2011/10/17/move-over-china-why-india-may-be-the-better-partner-for-latin-america/#ixzz1bGkGRDG3