A halt to trade talks between the European Union and the United States is now likely, French Trade Minister Matthias Fekl said yesterday.
Negotiators have been battling to reach a deal before President Barack Obama leaves office in January but points of contention remain, ranging from food safety standards to support for small business.
France has been particularly vocal about what it sees as a lack of movement on the US side. “Given the approach being taken by the United States today, [a halt] is the most likely option,” Fekl said on Europe 1 radio.
Fekl said in April that the talks should be scrapped in the absence of further progress.
His intervention comes a day after Greenpeace called for the talks to stop, citing concerns a deal would compromise food safety. To support its case it published confidential documents it said showed entrenched positions on the two sides.
The environmentalist pressure group argues that the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) would hand too much power to big business at the expense of consumers and national governments.
Documents show the US wants to replace Europe’s ‘precautionary principle’
Greenpeace opposes the proposed TTIP, arguing with other critics that it would hand too much power to big business at the expense of consumers and national governments.
Supporters say TTIP would deliver more than $100 billion of economic gains on both sides of the Atlantic.
Greenpeace Netherlands published 248 pages of “consolidated texts” for 13 chapters – or about half – of the deal on the website TTIP-leaks.org on Monday. They date from early April, before a round of meetings in New York last week.
“We’ve done this to ignite a debate,” Greenpeace trade expert Juergen Knirsch told a news conference in Berlin, adding that the documents showed the negotiations should be halted.
Knirsch said the texts showed the United States wanted to replace Europe’s “precautionary principle” – which prevents potentially harmful products from coming to market when their effect is unknown or disputed – with a less stringent approach.
In Brussels, EU chief negotiator Ignacio Garcia Bercero dismissed Greenpeace’s comments on the precautionary principle, adding: “We have made crystal clear that we would not agree on anything that implies changes of our regulatory regime on GMOs (genetically modified organisms).”
The negotiators aim to have “consolidated texts” by July, when a 14th round of talks is due to be held. They would then try to settle the thornier issues in the second half of 2016.
A survey published last month by the Bertelsmann Foundation showed waning support for a TTIP deal in both Germany and the United States after three years of negotiations.