Bridges Weekly Trade News Digest • Volume 13 • Number 34 • 7th October 2009
Colombia and Peru in Final Trade Talks with EU
Colombia and Peru are close to finalising a free trade accord with the European Union, officials said after their sixth and final round of negotiations, held in Geneva from 21 to 25 September. But despite recent progress, negotiators continue to clash in the talks on agricultural market access. The EU’s banana tariffs remain a particularly delicate subject.
“The EU remains committed to concluding these agreements in mutual benefit,” said Rupert Schlegelnich, Commissioner for Commerce in the European Commission. “This is something more than a trade agreement: it is part of the response to the crisis, and not part of the problem, as some are trying to make us believe,” he added.
As of this most recent meeting, negotiators have almost reached agreement on trade in industrial goods and have made significant progress in the talks on intellectual property, services and health issues. The delegates have also broached questions related to biodiversity, sustainable development, and agricultural market access. At this point in the negotiations, the latter topic still requires more work, especially with regard to European tariffs on products like sugar and bananas.
“We are ever closer to reaching 100 per cent, but those smaller percentages that remain have a greater relative importance as far as the meaning of the agreement,” Santiago Pardo, head of the Colombian delegation explained, according to a report from FIS.
The EU’s treatment of banana imports, a long-standing sore point in Europe’s relationship with Latin America, is the main obstacle in the negotiations. The debate is playing out simultaneously on two fronts: at the World Trade Organization in Geneva and in regional-level free trade talks between the EU and Central America, in addition to the talks with Colombia and Peru.
But in the regional talks, the EU position has remained static, as the 27-nation bloc says that it prefers to reach a deal on banana tariffs within the WTO. A preliminary (but not finalised) deal proposed during high-level WTO talks in July 2008 would gradually bring down banana import tariffs from €176 to €114 per tonne between now and 2014. But Colombia wants to reach agreement on a bilateral basis, and is looking for better terms than those set out in the preliminary agreement put forward last year. Colombia is the world’s third-largest exporter of bananas, after Ecuador and Costa Rica.
Colombia and Peru took part in the most recent talks with the EU, but Ecuador, which participated in the previous round of talks, sat out this time, saying that it was not happy that the parties had abandoned the idea of negotiating a regional deal with the entire Community of Andean Nations (Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru). Bolivia has stayed on the sidelines since the beginning of negotiations; the country says it strongly opposes the free trade talks with Brussels.
ICTSD reporting; translated and adapted from Puentes Quincenal, Vol. 6, No. 17; “Trade agreement with Colombia, Peru enters final stretch,” FIS, 29 September 2009.