Today the EU and New Zealand reached a political agreement on a comprehensive trade agreement with New Zealand. The final deal including tariff rate quotas (TRQs) has effectively been endorsed and includes a substantial access to the EU’s market on dairy, sheep meat and beef. While Copa and Cogeca recognise the high consumer protection standards in New Zealand and the effort made by the Commission to protect GIs and EU production standards in the deal found, painful compromises have been made on sensitive sectors.
On 30 June 2022, the European Union and New Zealand concluded a political agreement on their four-year negotiations on an ambitious trade agreement. What remains at this point is for the negotiators on both sides to work through technical issues, such as translating the political lines agreed into legal text and conditions, before starting the ratification procedure.
As far as agriculture is concerned, important concessions have been made in already sensitive sectors in Europe. This will increase our structural negative trade balance (roughly €750 million in 2021) on agriculture, in a period where we are struggling to continue investing on sustainability. Our products, such as wine and pigmeat, already perform in this market of 4.8 million inhabitants, leaving little margin to balance our trade for the benefit of the EU agricultural sector.
Whilst New Zealand exporters already have market access for 75,000t of butter and 11,000t of cheese, this additional access to the EU’s added value protein market and sensitive products (butter 15,000t, cheese 25,000t, milk powder 15,000t) will substantially increase market pressure and will provide a strong bargaining hold on import management to one dairy company. Additionally, the 38,000t concession for sheep meat will come on top of the current market access according to the World Trade Organization’s TRQs set at 114,184t.
This causes major concern about the cumulative impact of concessions granted by the EU to New Zealand that may come on top of already agreed TRQs in other bilateral and multilateral negotiations for beef (an additional 10,000 grass fed) and sheep and therefore should be taken into account for future trade agreements.
On the approved trade agreements, Copa-Cogeca Secretary -General Pekka Pesonen stated, “Copa and Cogeca welcome the fact that the EU production safety standards (e.g. hormone- free beef) and GIs hav e been recognised under the agreement with New Zealand. We acknowledge the commitments that both the EU and New Zealand have agreed upon with regards to incorporating the principles of the Paris agreement and sustainability in international trade. However, we know that for key sectors such as dairy, sheep and beef production this agreement is painful. Therefore, we call for a proper management and monitoring of tariff rate quotas (TRQs) on imports of agricultural products to avoid market failure.”
Artigo publicado originalmente em Copa Cogeca.