Current Transatlantic trade talks should be halted and a new set started, France’s trade minister said yesterday, adding his voice to German calls for an end to the negotiations.
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The Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership is probably best known by its acronym, TTIP – not to be confused with the TPP, the trans-Pacific trade deal that President Barack Obama is hoping will get through Congress.
Fekl, France’s secretary of state for foreign trade, said talks could resume if wider EU-U.S. trade relations improved.
Gabriel compared TTIP with the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), a free-trade treaty that the European Union and Canada have been negotiating, which he said was fairer on the parties involved.
French President Francois Hollande said Tuesday, August 30, that talks on a landmark trade deal between the US and European Union are unbalanced and can not be completed before President Barack Obama leaves office. There’s resistance on both continents, and the talks are complicated by Britain’s planned exit from the 28-nation European Union and upcoming presidential elections in the USA and France. “If there is no change, there will be no TTIP”, he said.
“I anticipate that when he travels to Europe in mid-September that they’ll be engaged in substantive discussions and hopefully will be able to make some additional progress”, Earnest said.
“The Americans give nothing or just crumbs. that is not how negotiations are done between allies”, he said.
On Sunday, August 28, German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said “in my opinion, the negotiations with the United States have de facto failed, even though nobody is really admitting it”.
They included Italy, whose trade and industry minister said it was essential for Italian exporters that the negotiations bore fruit.
Germany’s Gabriel is the chairman of the Social Democrats who share power with German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives. Merkel backs the talks and her spokesman insisted on Monday that they should continue.
The comments put the EU’s two biggest economies at odds with both the official line from the European Commission, the bloc’s executive, and the U.S. Trade Representative Michael Froman.
Not all agree that the talks have failed.
Trade analysts say that Washington may be preparing for the end of trade talks, which typically conclude with each side holding the other responsible for failure.
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“The goal is to get rid of the remaining mostly small tariffs in place between the United States and Europe on the trade front”, says Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations specializing in USA economic competitiveness.
