In a meeting with John Clarke DG Agriculture Director on Trade outlined how any talk on a possible EU/Chinese FTA was ‘many years premature’.

A deal that would give us access in dairy at the same level as the New Zealanders and more recently the Australians is simply not on the horizon.

He did outline, that movement on trade relations was ongoing and that it was concentrating on mutual recognition of Geographical Indicators of foods such as parmesan and feta, an area the holds little or no interest for our dairy industry.

Clarke said an agreement in this area though as a ‘first deliverable’ in EU/China Agri trade relations.

Other Deals:

Canada (CETA):

As the first completed G8 Agri partner with a FTA agreed with, the political deal is still in the process of ‘legal scrubbing’ and then has to be approved by national parliaments across Europe. That is projected to be approved by the end of 2016.

From an Irish dairy point of view our main interest is access to a tariff quota of 16,500 tonnes of high quality cheese.

USA (TTIP):

Despite a 9th round of negotiations recently in Washington, the TTIP is running into a wave of negative global publicity as well as very slow progress with the American’s more focussed on a trade deal with Pacific countries in a negotiation process that is running parallel to TTIP.

South America (MERCOSUR):

With the Argentinians at the helm and little progress being made because of infighting with between the South American bloc, the commission comment on same were that we were in ’calm waters’ because of internal ‘gridlock’.

Japan:

Butter and Milk powder access for the EU remains a very steep barrier as the Japanese look to product domestic production, but the Japanese seem slightly more willing to allow European cheese in to fill a growing domestic demand.

Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia and other SE Asian countries:

Good progress is being made on market access issues on the above, and this has been augmented with a recent Irish Government announcement that Bord Bia is going to be funded to set up an office in Saigon. Indonesia remains a key country where no EU negotiations have started, despite the potential of the market there.

By Conor Mulvihill