It is increasingly anticipated that negotiations on the Japan-European Union Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) will make a sudden progress this month.
Members of EU’s negotiating team will visit Japan next week starting December 4 in order to reach broad agreement on the EPA with their counterparts of the Japanese Government by the end of this year. Working-level talks will be held by officials of the EU Commission and Japanese Government in Tokyo.
A farm trade is one of the controversial agendas in the EPA negotiations, in which EU has been requesting the Japanese Government to open a market of dairy products more than Japan will liberalize it when the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) free trade pact takes effect.
There is now no prospect that the TPP free trade pact will be enforced in a near future. Under this situation, stakeholders in the country are closely watching how the Japanese Government will deal with the controversial issues including a farm trade in the negotiations.
In the past negotiations, the Japanese negotiators asked EU’s counterparts to eliminate custom duties for imports of manufactured goods including automobiles.
On the other hand, the EU officials urged the Japanese Government to substantially open the import markets for EU products such as cheese, other dairy products, pork, pasta, and chocolate.
The cheese is one of the products of particular export interest to the EU Commission. EU negotiators are likely to request Japan to reduce import tariffs and increase import quotas for soft cheeses such as Camembert and Mozzarella. The Japanese Government had not slashed the import tariff on those cheeses at the TPP free trade negotiations.