Can’t compromise national interest to meet trade deal deadlines: Piyush Goyal

Union Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal on Friday said one cannot compromise with national interest just to meet trade agreement deadlines. The Minister said that at the end of the day, trade agreements have to be win-win for both sides.

“You always need to have timelines for all deadlines for whatever work you do. We do that in business all the time, don’t we? Every action should be defined in terms of a responsibility that takes a timeline, but in the case of retail agreements, these are indicated timelines…,” the Commerce Minister said, speaking at the Carnegie Global Technology Summit here in the national capital.

“But at the end of the day, it has to be a win-win for both sides. It has to be a fair, equitable, and balanced solution. Just to meet the deadline, you cannot compromise national interest,” he added.

India is currently working on trade agreements with many countries and blocks of nations, including with the EU, the UK, and the US. India-US trade deal is expected to inked by the fall of 2025. India-EU FTA is expected by the end of 2025.

On the trade deal with the EU, Goyal said the severity of the non-tariff barriers that Europe has created, particularly on climate regulations, have created road blocks.

“Unless Europe recognizes the path that they are going down, if I can say it down a little bit, I see serious difficulty for Europe to be able to do trade with any country to get India. I am actually a worried man for the very future of the European Union and their position, given the kind of dramatically difficult non-tariff barriers that they have set up, both for their own benefit and for the benefit of the people,” he explained.

“There’ll be two areas on which the European Union will have to rethink. One is these non-trade issues with the seek to superimpose into trade agenda. Unless they get that out of their system and the European Commission will need to reflect on it, they’ll find it very difficult to get a trade agreement with anybody whatsoever. Any self-respecting decent country cannot sign up on commitments which are irrational beyond the realm of trade and where. The rest of the world has been responsible for the problem in the first place and has sought to be put on our head as if it’s our responsibility to resolve,” he said, stressing upon Europe’s climate regulations.

Talking about India’s trade, he asserted that India has been for long “sitting in a very cosy comfort” of a large domestic market, giving them huge business opportunities here in India.

“Our exports account for a very small percentage of our GDP at present. Even within our exports, we are quite a bit import dependent for the products that we are exporting. So if we look at COVID when exports fell, our imports fell even faster. And we landed up with a trade surplus,” the minister said.