The India-EU Trade and Investment Agreements negotiation talks concluded on 1 July in New Delhi. The negotiations were also held on Geographical Indicators (GI). India and European Union resumed talks on Free Trade Agreement (FTA) after a long period of 8 years on 17 June 2022.
In the FTA negotiation, the Indian side was led by Negotiator Ms. Nidhi Mani Tripathi, Joint Secretary, Department of Commerce, and the India-EU was represented by its Chief Negotiator, Mr. Christophe Kiener.
The week-long session of the first round was held in hybrid mode, some of the teams met in Delhi and other officials joined virtually. In the first round, 58 sessions were conducted that covered 18 policy areas of the Trade Agreement. And 7 sessions related to Investment Protection and Geographical Indicators were held during the talks.
The FTA negotiation talks will go further and the 2nd round will be held in Brussels in September 2022.
After resuming the negotiations in June this year, the EU Trade Commissioner Valdis Dombrovskis said, Minister Goyal and I have concluded a fruitful meeting. Today we formally resume EU-India FTA talks and start negotiations on an Investment Protection Agreement and Geographical Indicators (GI).
On the finalization of FTA, he said that we aim to finalize the talks by the end of 2024. These far-reaching negotiations on trade, investment protection, and geographical indications open a new and exciting chapter in EU-India relations.
The FTA negotiation between the EU and India stopped in 2013 after several rounds of talks over 6 years. Firstly, negotiations had started in 2007, but both sides had major concerns about tariffs on some products and professional movement and the EU sought a duty cut on the automobile, wine, spirits, and dairy products, and a strong intellectual property regime.
India and European Union trade accounted for 116.36 billion USD in 2021-22 with a trade growth of 44.51 percent between the two regions in 2021-22. EU is India’s second-largest trade partner after the United States and the second-largest importer.
