Speaking at an event organised by the Belgian think tank Bruegel, India’s ambassador to the EU Jaimini Bhagwati said that he was confident of signing FTA with the EU in the coming months. He further added, the negotiations which began June last year has already completed five rounds and another two more would be held in February and March to finalize the deal. India and Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are expected to sign FTA during the ASEAN summit which is planned to be held between February 27 and March 1 2009. The EU and ASEAN began talks with India during the same period last year.
The occasion which marked the release of the study titled “Beyond the WTO? An anatomy of EU and US preferential trade agreements”, Bhagwati remarked that the EU’s human rights conditionality clause in the trade deal did not pose any threat to the talks as there was a separate forum to discuss that between them. Nevertheless, later in another occasion he stated India always wanted their trade accords to be confined to trade issues only.
“Beyond the WTO” is a research material by the Bruegel, an independent and neutral organisation which is dedicated to international economics. One of the authors of the study, Andre Sapir, a former economic adviser to the president of the European Commission, however, firmly stated the EU and India would not sign the FTA agreement. He also said it would not be possible for India to have an agreement with the EU and the US since both have similar trade conditions for all their trade agreements. The study has mentioned that the EU and the US made prior conditions to all their trade accords to impose their ways to run the world.
In last December, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) backed out from the FTA talks with the EU citing that the EU was not budging on various issues despite making many concessions and responding favourably to the their several demands. Sapir probably would have felt that FTA between India and the EU was not possible because last year India had to withdraw from FTA talks with the US owing to the compulsion of including agricultural products to the accord. In India, protecting agricultural products are not only a commercial issue but also a political one. Nonetheless, as far as Indo-EU FTA is concerned, agricultural issue will not trouble the deal since the EU is not a major agricultural producer.