Brussels, 16/11/2005 (Agence Europe) - On 14 November, the Council of the EU gave its green light to the opening of negotiations for the reciprocal liberalisation of agricultural trade between the EU and the countries of the Mediterranean basin. The decision removes the taboo of excluding agriculture from the planned broad area of free trade in the region, which is planned to come into force by 2010. It is not entirely unrelated to negotiations at the WTO on agricultural dossier, and is also said to be one of the concrete results to be flagged up at the 10th anniversary of the Barcelona process. The Commission hopes that the partner countries will start negotiations without delay. Morocco is already disposed to do this, as is Egypt. However, at a meeting of high-ranking agricultural civil servants of the EU and the Mediterranean countries, just as soon after the Community decision taken in Brussels on 14 November, alongside Moroccan and Egyptian enthusiasm, a more reserved attitude from the Israelis and Tunisians was notable; these two countries would prefer to wait for the result of the ministerial conference of the WTO to be held in Hong-Kong.
The offer to negotiate (bilaterally) relates only to countries which have signed association agreements and an action plan under the neighbourhood policy. It "authorises the Commission to negotiate mutual concessions on agricultural products, processed agricultural products and fisheries products with Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority and Tunisia", the Council indicates. Syria does not feature on the list because its association agreement with the EU has not yet been signed. It does not relate to Libya, as this country does not yet have any contractual links with the EU.
The total liberalisation of trade by 2010 will be achieved within the limits agreed to by the WTO (covering a minimum of between 80 and 90% of agricultural flow). The procedure was launched by recommendation, made in Venice in November 2003 by the first informal meeting of the agriculture ministers of the euro-Mediterranean area. The Euromed foreign affairs ministers regularly confirmed the objective during their annual conferences (The Hague, Naples and Dublin). A meeting of high-level agricultural civil servants of the Euromed area, last April in Morocco, enabled the drafting of a "roadmap", which was approved politically in May by the Euromed ministerial conference of Luxembourg, and adopted technically by the European agriculture ministers on 14 November.
This decision marks a turning point as it breaks with the procedure traditionally used up to now for agricultural cooperation under the association agreements, which provided for, at best, a gradual improvement of access regimes with review clauses (for example, the next reviews are for 2006 with Tunisia and Morocco in 2007 with Israel and Egypt). The principle of asymmetry had been applied: the EU must liberalise all incoming Mediterranean fresh and processed agricultural products, whereas the other way round, tariff and non-tariff barriers will be lifted at a much slower pace, and limited to products for which the partner countries are net importers (cereals, milk, etc). However, the decision of 14 November aims at the total and reciprocal opening up of the European and Mediterranean markets, with the exception of a "limited list of products to be excluded from the liberalisation", without contravening WTO rules. This tariff dismantling will be carried out according to a different timetable for each country, aligned on that already set in place for industrial free-trade (12 years after the entry into force of each association agreement: 2012 for the first signatory, Tunisia, followed by Israel, and Morocco).
This commitment to a total and reciprocal opening up of the agricultural markets explicitly sets the objective of a free-trade area in the Euromed zone on a regional perspective, although at this stage, nothing has been said about encouraging "South-South" free-trade. Without revealing the entire content of the negotiation mandate, Community sources have taken pains to stress that the procedure is more ambitious than in the past. It is no longer based upon purely commercial considerations, but also includes accompanying measures, with the long-term objective of including the whole of Euro-Mediterranean agriculture. In Luxembourg last May, the ministers recommended an examination of the "cooperation and technical assistance measures in the sanitary and phytosanitary sectors" and to "launch a regional cooperation programme on rural development", and envisaged "the need for support measures designed to compensate for the effect of structural changes on the sectors in question" (but without reaching any conclusions on this point). One of the recommendations of the "roadmap" is, however, "to identify and support projects in sectors likely to benefit from funding from the Facility for Euro-Mediterranean Investment in Partnership (FEMIP) launched by the EIB". In order to do this, the partner countries are called upon to "develop measures to create the appropriate regulatory framework to encourage private investment".