TOKYO, July 8 – “We’ve reached political agreement at ministerial level on an EU-Japan trade deal. We now recommend to leaders to confirm this at summit,” European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom tweeted on July 5 after meeting Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida in Brussels.
The negotiations ended all too soon. The meeting between Kishida and Malmstrom, which some speculated would go on until late at night, was finished in an hour or so. The two announced that they reached consensus on the Japan-EU Economic Partnership Agreement and painted eyes on daruma dolls to mark the achievement. All happened before the delegation of Liberal Democratic Party lawmakers arrived in Brussels.
Three days before, in the early morning of July 2, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries Minister Yuji Yamamoto was at the Foreign Ministry’s Iikura Guest House in Tokyo, waiting for Phil Hogan, the EU’s Commissioner of Agriculture and Rural Development. Hogan, who arrived 15 minutes late, asked Yamamoto to speak with him in private for 15 minutes.
The biggest sticking point was tariffs on soft cheeses. As Yamamoto stood ready to talk, Hogan continued to make tough demands regarding opening Japan’s markets to European products.
Russia, which used to be the largest importer of European cheese, banned imports of dairy products from the EU in 2014 in response to sanctions imposed following Russia’s annexation of Crimea from Ukraine. The EU, which lost its biggest customer, looked to Japan for a market to sell dairy products.
The EU’s cheese production is the largest in the world. Its 28 member countries produce different types of cheese and each of them has its own specialty. That is why Japan proposed setting a low-tariff quota for soft cheeses in general, without specifying the types of cheese.
The agriculture ministry initially estimated that Japan would import roughly 20,000 tons of soft cheeses annually from the EU. But Hogan insisted on Japan setting a quota of 60,000 tons for European cheese.
While Japan’s per capita consumption of cheese is only 2.2 kg, the European average is 18.3 kg, nearly ten times as much. Hogan argued that the demand in Japan would increase along with changes in the diet. However, Yamamoto said Japan’s consumption of cheese will not expand that much, considering the nation’s aging population and the declining birthrate.
Both sides refused to offer concessions, and the ministerial meeting continued on and off through the day when they finally settled on setting the quota at 31,000 tons, based on a demand forecast that the consumption would grow by 3 percent per year.
Despite their consensus, Yamamoto told reporters after the meeting that the situation remained tough, pretending that negotiations were ongoing, apparently to let Prime Minister Shinzo Abe take the credit for the achievement by announcing the trade deal on July 6 with EU leaders. At a news conference on July 6, Yamamoto admitted that the two parties reached agreement “five minutes before 8:30 p.m.” on July 2.