Brussels, 26/09/2011 (Agence Europe) - EU trade ministers, meeting in Brussels on Monday 26 September, decided to offer four countries - Tunisia, Morocco, Egypt and Jordan - the opportunity to negotiate new trade agreements with the EU, using a differentiated approach. According to the president-in-office of the Council, Polish Minister Marcin Korolec, the aim is to send out a “political signal” to these countries, seen as the main players in the Arab spring. The EU must strengthen its relations with its neighbours to begin with, was the substance of what Korolec said.
European Trade Commissioner Karel De Gucht added that Libya would be involved at a later stage and that this would be a “resumption of the negotiations (begun but not concluded)” with this country, on “new bases”. He said that negotiating mandates, based on a Commission proposal of 21 September, would be agreed before the end of October.
The Council will be called on to adopt an “overall platform” for the four countries, but negotiations with each will be conducted separately and outcomes will not necessarily be identical. It will all depend on the progress each of the countries makes individually, though there will be a common objective - integration of their markets with the EU market and integration into the European internal market. With this in mind, the Commission and Council propose to speed up talks on access arrangements for agricultural products and on services.
Each country will conduct negotiations in line with its own specific situation, De Gucht added, picking up the argument made by French minister Pierre Lellouche who, on behalf of France, put down a “draft initiative” breaking more clearly with the overall regional approach which has been used hitherto and which was supposed to bring about a multilateral EuroMed free-trade area from 2010. De Gucht said the French proposal differed from the one approved in that the former advocated completely separate mandates for all four countries. The Council preferred to think of the mandates on the basis of a “common platform”. “No across-the-board mandate”, insisted Lellouche, however. In his view, “adopting a negotiating mandate for a geographical area that doesn't correspond to political and trade reality would not be appropriate”, and an across-the-board mandate would be “ill-suited”. When asked why the change of approach with regard to the Euro-Mediterranean area, De Gucht replied laconically: “The Council asked us to do it”. (FB/transl.rt)