EU: United States Free Trade Agreement

Baroness Hooper Excerpts

Wednesday 19th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint]

I agree with the noble Lord that this is an extremely important negotiation. It is indeed the case that in the wake of the stalling of the Doha round, regional arrangements of this kind is the inevitable way forward in practice for free trade. The EU has a heavy agenda; a couple of weeks ago, it agreed a mandate for negotiating with Japan—obviously another major economy. The EU-US deal will be the most important one for the reasons that the noble Lord has indicated—the importance of the two blocks in world trade—and I assure him that the British Government will pursue every avenue that we can to encourage, support and cajole others into working to get this deal done.

[Baroness Hooper]

My Lords—

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine]

My Lords—

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint]

The noble Lord has pointed out a number of the issues which will indeed be points of difficulty in the negotiations. Agriculture will clearly be a significant demand on the part of the United States. On the part of the European Union, and indeed so far as the UK is concerned, freer access to the services market in the US is an important demand. The complexity at that end lies in part in the fact that some of the regulations are at state level not at federal level in the US, and this just points to the general theme that this is going to be a difficult, long and painstaking process. It would be naive of any of us to believe that it will take merely a few months to get a deal done.

[Baroness Hooper]

My Lords, given the recently concluded treaty between the European Union and the region of central America and the ongoing negotiations with the Mercosur countries—Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil—is there any scope for going one step further and, once the bilateral agreement with the United States is completed, having an EU-NAFTA treaty?

[Lord Green of Hurstpierpoint]

My noble friend asks an important question about the wider ramifications of a US deal. Indeed, NAFTA is the first consideration here. The EU already has an agreement with Mexico—I think I am right in saying that it was signed in 2000. It is a deal which covers only tariffs and not non-tariff barriers, and Commissioner De Gucht has publicly mused on the value of updating that agreement in time. The EU is in the midst of negotiations with Canada and is hoping to conclude them within the first few weeks of the coming year. As far as Mercosur is concerned, I think that there is a lot further to go. At the moment, the negotiations are rather stalled, but a recognition of their importance is the fact that we will keep going, not least because of the importance of the Brazilian economy.