Citazione:
Obama to Open Trade Talks With E.U.
By JAMES KANTER and JACK EWING
Published: February 13, 2013
BRUSSELS — Answering pleas from European leaders desperate for a way to speed up economic growth, President Obama said on Tuesday that the United States would begin talks on a comprehensive trade agreement with the European Union.
Mr. Obama devoted a single sentence to the topic in his State of the Union address, but that was what proponents of a trade deal had been hoping for. His statement set the stage for talks to remove tariff barriers and regulatory hurdles between the United States and the European Union, which are already each other’s largest trading partners.
“And tonight, I’m announcing that we will launch talks on a comprehensive Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the European Union,” Mr. Obama said, in the process also giving the potential pact a name. He added, “because trade that is fair and free across the Atlantic supports millions of good-paying American jobs.”
Karel De Gucht, the E.U. trade commissioner, said completing such a trade deal could take about two years, according to an advance copy of remarks he was expected to make in Brussels on Wednesday.
Mr. De Gucht said that he wanted formal negotiations to begin before the summer and that his goal was “then to push ahead with them as quickly as possible.”
Some of the toughest negotiations are expected to focus on food and pharmaceutical regulations in Europe — but Mr. De Gucht made several pointed references to concessions that the Europeans would seek from the United States.
“First of all, we still need to dismantle any remaining traditional tariffs and then we need to make headway on market access issues in other areas, such as public procurement, services and investment,” said Mr. De Gucht, according to the advance copy of his remarks.
He said an example was “the barriers faced by European car manufacturers over their exports to the U.S.”
He added that automobile safety rules in Europe and the United States were similarly strict, so “perhaps it makes sense to look together at putting in place a system of mutual recognition.”
There are many sensitive and complex issues to overcome. On Tuesday, two powerful U.S. senators warned that any deal must open Europe to American farm products.
Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, who is chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, and Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the highest-ranking Republican on the committee, said that a trade deal presented an “enticing opportunity.”
But in a letter to Ron Kirk, the U.S. Trade Representative, they also wrote, “Broad bipartisan Congressional support for expanding trade with the EU depends, in large part, on lowering trade barriers for American agricultural products.”
E.U. leaders, including Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain and Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, have been pushing for a trade deal as a low-cost way of stimulating their struggling economies. Both have called for a deal numerous times since Mr. Obama’s re-election. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and large companies like General Electric have also lobbied for an agreement.
There had been some frustration among supporters of a deal that more progress was not being made. A group of U.S. and E.U. officials has been preparing the ground for formal talks, but its report is several months late.
Mr. Kirk, the U.S. trade representative, said during a visit to Davos, Switzerland, last month that Mr. Obama was in favor of an agreement but wanted to make sure a treaty would overcome objections by some farm groups and be able to pass Congress.
Mr. Obama’s reference to talks about a possible free-trade pact with the European Union was a late addition to his State of the Union address, according to a senior administration official, because a U.S.-E.U. working group had sent recommendations to Washington only Tuesday that the two sides were close enough on various issues to pursue negotiations toward a comprehensive free-trade agreement, rather than a more limited one.
That high-level working group has spent most of a year discussing whether the talks would cover just tariff issues, for example, or regulatory ones like questions on environmental, pharmaceutical and automobile industry issues. The administration official, who declined to be identified, said the Europeans, being eager “for anything that looks like a growth strategy,” seemed “to be ready to take on some of the more difficult issues” like agriculture.
Tariffs on goods traveling between the United States and Europe are low, averaging about 3 percent, but proponents say that the savings from eliminating duties would still be significant because the volume of trade is so enormous. Commerce between the Union and the United States totaled $646 billion last year, according to U.S. government figures.
Mr. Kirk has estimated that eliminating trade barriers could add $50 billion to the U.S. economy.
Potentially more important than abolishing tariffs, but also much more complicated, would be a deal that harmonized regulations on products like food, cars, toys and pharmaceuticals. Automobile manufacturers like Daimler, for example, would like to see agreement on safety and emissions standards for cars, reducing or eliminating the need to build different versions for the U.S. and European markets.
But harmonizing regulations is fiendishly difficult, in part because the 27 countries in the European Union have not completely synchronized their own rules.
European restrictions on imports of chickens washed with chlorine and beef treated with hormones have long irritated U.S. meat exporters, and one of the knottiest areas of any future trade negotiations is likely to be in the area of biotechnology foods.
In their letter, Senator Baucus and Senator Hatch expressed concern about rules for sanitizing food “that act as significant barriers to U.S.-EU trade.”
The European Commission, the group based in Brussels that would lead any trade negotiations with the United States, has sought for years to break a legal deadlock on growing genetically modified crops in Europe.
In so doing, the commission, the policy making and administrative arm for the Union, has hoped to remove an irritant in trade relations with the United States and with other countries that use biotechnology, and to lower costs for European farmers and industry.
Yet the commission has repeatedly bumped up against stiff opposition in countries like France and Austria, where hostility to what people there call Frankenfoods is deep-seated and seemingly unshakable.
The withdrawal from the market last year of a potato produced by BASF, a German chemical group, left a type of corn produced by Monsanto as the only biotechnology crop grown in Europe.
In biotechnological corn and soy for animal feed, the Union takes a more permissive approach. But European farmers still face long delays before being able to source new products because of an approvals process that allows member states to deadlock for years before the commission can issue its own approval.
Skepticism among Europeans about new food technologies has since spread to the cloning of livestock.
Like biotechnological crops, the descendants of animal clones are an accepted part of the food chain in the United States. But the practice remains rare or nonexistent in the Union, although Denmark is the only member state that has banned cloning for food outright.
Three years ago the commission proposed a way to regulate imports of milk and meat products — and large amounts of eggs, semen and embryos — from cloned animals raised in countries where the technique is used, like the United States, Argentina and Brazil.
Rather than banning those products outright and setting off a fight with the United States at the World Trade Organization, the commission proposed other ways of regulating products derived from clones. But those efforts failed in 2011 when E.U. governments and the European Parliament failed to agree on how sweeping the rules should be.
Thomas J. Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said last month that a deal could be concluded within 18 months if both sides set their minds to it.
But others, noting the disagreements over food issues, say it could take much longer and still not succeed.
China was the second-largest trading partner of the United States last year, with goods totaling $536 billion, but most of that trade consisted of wares exported from China to the United States. American trade with Europe is more balanced. The United States sold goods worth $265 billion to the Union, more than twice as much as it exported to China, according to the U.S. Commerce Department.