The EU27 trade ministers, meeting in Luxembourg on Friday 3 June, discussed the transatlantic relationship as the EU seeks strong allies on the world stage.
They insisted on the need, firstly, to resolve “in a sustainable way” the trade disputes still existing between the EU and the US, according to French Trade Minister Franck Riester.
The EU and the US are currently working together on two major thorny issues on which temporary solutions were found last year. These are the so-called ‘Section 232’ tariffs on steel and aluminium and the tariffs arising from the Airbus/Boeing dispute.
In the first case, a truce was reached for two years, during which time EU Commissioner for Trade Valdis Dombrovskis must find a comprehensive agreement on green steel and aluminium with his US counterpart, Katherine Tai (see EUROPE 12824/4). “Technical discussions are underway on global steel and aluminium overcapacity, the carbon footprint of production and many other issues. We are working with the deadline of the end of October 2023 on this agreement”, Dombrovskis told EUROPE. For the second case, a five-year suspension of tariffs was decided (see EUROPE 12741/1).
Need for a strong partner in the WTO
The discussion on transatlantic relations also takes place in the context of the upcoming 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) (see separate article in this Bulletin). The EU calls for a stronger US role in the organisation.
Washington has been blocking the WTO’s appellate body for several years by not appointing an American judge, which has created a paralysis of this body, which is no longer able to judge appeals for disputes. The EU is working with the US to engage constructively in WTO reform. Part of the technical work of the EU-US Trade and Technology Council (TTC) focuses on this issue.
On the TTC, on the other hand, all Ministers welcomed the work done in this framework and reported by Commissioner Dombrovskis (see EUROPE 12953/4). (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)