A delegation of higher experts from the European Commission managed by the head of the trade department Sabine Weyand is in Washington today and tomorrow to meet American counterparts, the EU director confirmed on Tuesday.
The objective is to progress negotiations after the United States has launched a tariff volley against the EU in mid-March: imposing a 25% levy on imports of steel, aluminum and cars and a coverage rate of 10% on all EU imports. A 20% coverage rate on goods has been suspended for 90 days while waiting for negotiations.
EU’s commerce commissioner Maroš Šefčovič, conceded that negotiations are “not easy” during an exchange with deputies of deputies on Tuesday, noting that the EU offered the United States a zero price on cars and industrial goods.
“We are not weak, under excessive pressure, to accept an agreement that is unfair to us,” said the deputies commissioner.
Šefčovič, who has gone to the United States since commercial hostilities began, told Parliament that he had “personally” discussed with the American secretary Howard Lutnick and the trade representative Jamieson Greer on the way in which the United States and the EU would be “stronger” by collaborating, starting with “critical matters of critical matters, drugs and overhanging in steel”.
The overcapacity has been identified by the EU and the United States as a problem both compared to China, the commission spokesman Olof Gill said on Monday. “It is not a question of teaming up against China”, but of “solving a problem that we both identified,” he added.
The EU, which has a trade surplus of 50 billion euros with the United States, is also ready to “look at areas such as energy, including liquid natural gas, certain agricultural products, soybeans for example, where there could be a potential increase in imports from the United States EU”, also said Gill last Friday.
After a meeting on Monday between French President Emmanuel Macron and the chairman of the Ursula von der Leyen commission, during which trade was discussed, a French official said that the objective of negotiation between the EU and the United States was to “completely withdraw” the prices imposed by the United States, including the 10% coverage rate imposed by the United States since April 2.
“This asymmetrical situation should not become the new standard in the relationship between the EU and the United States,” added the French official.
