“These negotiations are dead and France wants an end to them”, Minister of Foreign Trade Matthias Fekl said Tuesday on RMC Radio.
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France effectively joins Germany, whose Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said that talks on the trade deal being thrashed out between the European Commission and the USA had “de facto failed”.
But French junior trade minister Matthias Fekl said there was “no more political support in France” for the talks because U.S. negotiators were offering “nothing or just crumbs”.
“We need to put a clean, clear and definitive stop to the process so we can restart the discussions on a good basis”.
Melinda St. Louis, the worldwide campaigns director at the Global Trade Watch division of Public Citizen, a Washington-based consumer advocacy group that is resistant to the current trade model, said no serious observers believe that TTIP will be concluded before the end of Obama’s administration.
TTIP negotiations have been ongoing since 2013 in an effort to establish a massive free trade zone that would eliminate many tariffs but which critics contend would jeopardize American businesses.
United States president Barrack Obama previously stated that if TTIP is not completed now it will be years before a trade deal can be negotiated, given a schedule of elections in the USA and across Europe.
Denouncing the TTIP looks like a similar ploy: The trade deal’s negative rating in Germany reached 59 percent late past year. He said he would withhold support from any agreement reached before the end of Barack Obama’s presidency in January.
“This is not how we should negotiate between allies”, he said. “It’s going to require the resolution of some pretty thorny negotiations, but the president and his team are committed to doing that”, White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters in Washington.
Three years of negotiations have failed to resolve multiple differences, however, including over public procurement and rules to protect foods from particular regions, such as Parma ham, which the European Union wants, and greater access to services and for its agricultural products, as demanded by the United States.
“The European demands, and also ambition, don’t actually match up with what the US wanted in reciprocation”, he said.
Politicians in the European Union and the U.S. would still set their own standards after any deal, he said.
Fekl said the negotiations no longer had “political support” in France because the United States negotiators “give nothing or just crumbs”. The Commission leads talks with the US for the EU.
Negotiations are now expected to be held after the US election in November, which could change the political landscape in Washington as protectionist rhetoric has driven the political debate between Republican candidate Donald Trump and Democrat Hillary Clinton. While TTIP’s advocates point to the economic benefits and the introduction of global standards, its detractors say it will erode wages and conditions. The European Commission says it still hopes for some sort of provisional implementation by then, once it gets approval from the European Parliament and the trade ministers of the EU’s member states.
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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 U.S. economic competitiveness.
