EU-India could explore 'less ambitious' FTA, says top MEP

With the India-EU FTA negotiations deadlocked, a top European Parliament member has said the two sides could explore the option of a "less ambitious" trade pact and indicated that there could be a separate negotiator for the crucial talks.
"May be some of the riders (in the proposed free trade agreement) are a bit too ambitious in certain areas," Geoffrey Van Orden, a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and the Chair of the European Parliament's Delegation for relations with India, told a visiting group of Indian journalists here.
He said the two sides could look at "exploring something slightly less ambitious" but asserted that first it is important to ascertain that why is there this "great holdup" and why there is a "lack of enthusiasm" for the pact.

Asked if it was Brexit or the ongoing talks on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) between the EU and the US holding the Broad-based Trade and Investment Agreement (BTIA), Van Orden said, "there is a certain validity" to the notion that TTIP was having an impact on the progress of the BTIA.
"I think because a lot of effort is going into TTIP and for a long time we have the same negotiator responsible for all of these agreements and we called upon the commission to appoint a separate negotiator for the BTIA. So I do think the capacity to deal with several major free trade agreements may be is lacking," the British Conservative Party politician and a former Army officer said.

Asked if there will now be a separate negotiator for the BTIA talks, Van Orden did not give a direct answer saying, "I understand that now the arrangements are slightly different."

Van Orden said that there was expectation that trade representatives from the two sides would be meeting on the sidelines of the G20 meeting in China in September.
"One of the things we hoped would come out of that summit (India-EU) would be a real new impulse to the negotiations on the free trade agreement. Formally it doesn't seem to have been that great impulse on either side," the MEP said.

"There is some very weak language in the communique and the expectation is that there would be further meetings on the margins of the G20 Summit that is to take place in China in early September," Van Orden said.
He said as a member of the European Parliament, he has put in a question to the European Commission to know when will the next round of FTA talks take place.
"I have not yet had a response to my question," he said.
Asked if a watered down agreement would be good, Cora van Nieuwenhuizen, vice chair of the Delegation for Relations with India, also answered in the affirmative.

"It is better to take small steps and move on than aiming
for very high goal that is not achievable in the near future. So any progress is progress. I think we should try to take small steps if the big ones are not possible yet," she told the journalists at an interaction here.
"I would like it (the FTA) to be more ambitious but if that is not possible...I think we should relate more on other topics because if you are among friends you move faster on all the files and if you never meet, you never become friends," Nieuwenhuizen said.

She stressed that there should be meetings on other topics and if that is done probably the atmosphere will change and it could become easier to make progress on trade as well.
At the India-EU Summit in March, for which Prime Minister Narendra Modi travelled to Brussels, both sides failed to make the much-awaited announcement on resumption of long stalled negotiations for a free trade agreement as many bottlenecks still remain.
Van Orden criticised the "vague" reference to the BTIA in the communique issued after the summit.
"The trouble with those communiques is that they are drafted in advance of summits. There might be a few odd changes here and there, another sentence, or something like that. The paragraph that was there about BTIA. You couldn't have found more vague language," he said.

Asked if Brexit, Britain's exit from the 28-nation bloc that was to be decided in a referendum on June 23, was holding BTIA, Van Orden said, "I don't think so at all. There is no reason why progress should not be made on this, meetings should not take place. We can't hold our breadth waiting for one thing to happen."
Also last week, Daniel Rosario, Spokesperson Trade, Directorate-General Communication -- European Commission, had asserted that automobiles and wines continue to be the sticking points in the long-stalled negotiations for the proposed FTA with India.
He had said the two sides should restart talks only after they have "something meaningful" to deliberate upon.

India had deferred FTA talks with the bloc in August last year over the European Union (EU) banning sale of around 700 pharma products clinically tested by GVK Biosciences.
Speaking on the issue, Rosario had said India's decision to defer the talks was "not justified".
Talking about President of the European Parliament Martin Schulz's visit to India, Van Orden said, "My understanding is that he is visiting in December."
On reports that he could visit in June, Van Orden said, "so much the better"
He emphasised that the FTA was important for the EU-India relationship but pointed out that there are "a lot of other things" happening and were talked about in the joint communique in terms of strategic partnership, in terms of terrorism and in terms of European Investment Bank's investments.

"There were a whole range of issues that were covered in that communique. So there is a good strong relationship there on various fronts. Don't forget many things which have happened on a bilateral basis," Van Orden said.