EU and GCC officials aim to resume FTA negotiations

Alamy/UK Sports Pics/Giuseppe Maffia

• EU/GCC FTA talks stuck for 35 years
• Focus on peace and prosperity partnership
• Trade with UAE and Saudi a key EU interest

European and Gulf officials are holding “informal” efforts to “revive” and even “upgrade” negotiations over a free trade agreement between the two blocks.

Efforts towards such an agreement are three and a half decades in the making, Luigi Di Maio, the EU’s special envoy to the Gulf has said.

“I have to say it’s a very bad symbol of our relationship because unfortunately these trade negotiations have been stuck for 35 years,” Di Maio added. 

“There are officials in the [Directorate General] Trade in Brussels that are younger than these negotiations. There are also many officials in the ministries of trade in the GCC states that are younger than these negotiations.”

Di Maio was speaking at a virtual event hosted by the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington DC while on a trip to Doha, where he inaugurated the EU-GCC business forum.

Formal talks on the trade deal between the blocks, on pause since 2008, have been harmstrung by differences over oil, public tenders and larger political concerns on the part of the EU.  

Di Maio said that, while there is hope the FTA negotiations might resume in the near future, officials from the EU and the six countries that form the Gulf Cooperation Council are in parallel advancing bilateral relationships under the umbrella of a new strategic partnership for peace and prosperity. 

The partnership focuses on five areas of common interest: trade and investment; energy; regional security; people to people exchanges; and institutional linkages.

The two-year-old effort yielded the first-ever leader summit between the EU and the GCC states on October 16.

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“The strategic partnership agreement is even a way to deal bilaterally with those countries without killing the free trade agreement at the regional level,” the EU special representative said.

Facilitating EU access to investment and trade in the GCC amid Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 development program, the UAE’s longstanding importance to the European business community, and the rise of ambitious renewables projects in states like Oman is a top European goal for the partnership, according to Di Maio.

Energy security emerged as another especially central area of focus at the October 16 meetings, AGBI reported at the time.

“The European Union is going to close the negotiations on a memorandum of understanding on energy cooperation with Saudi Arabia. We are ready for the implementation and it involves, for instance, collaboration and cooperation on hydrogen,” Di Maio said. 

“Saudi Arabia wants to be the main supplier of hydrogen at the world-level by 2030. The European Union by then is supposed to import a million tons of hydrogen,” the special representative added. “This means we need reliable partners.”

Relaxation of the EU visa regime for GCC nationals is a major issue for the Gulf. In recent months, Brussels has made multi-entry, five-year visas available to citizens of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and Saudi Arabia.

This has been a first step in what is slated to be a “strong process of liberalisation,” according to Di Maio. The UAE already has a full visa-waiver agreement with the EU.

The European parliament just this week gave its final go-ahead to EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s new team after the June election. Slovakia’s Maroš Šefčovič, a commission veteran who, among other things, led the bloc’s response to Brexit, now holds the trade portfolio.

“There is a lot of work to do, we are just at the beginning of a new path between the European Union and the GCC,” Di Maio said.

“But I’m optimistic because this is a moment where we need each other and we can create very good opportunities for the implementation of multilateral deals.”