EU akkoord met handelsakkoord Pakistan ondanks bedreiging voor textielindustrie (en)
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - The European Union on Thursday endorsed proposals to offer a substantial new trade pact to Pakistan in the wake of the country's disastrous floods, overcoming objections from a handful of EU states who worried their textile industries could be hurt by such a move.
The bloc is to offer the Asian nation increased market access to the EU for certain imports "to be implemented as soon as possible" and offer the country participation in the bloc's Generalised System of Preferences Plus scheme, which offers a reduced-tariff regime in return for democratic reform commitments in 2014.
EU premiers and presidents meeting in Brussels managed to reach a compromise that laid to rest fears of France, Italy, Poland and Portugal that their textile trade, also one of Pakistan's major exports, could be damaged.
The new language agreed stresses that the tariff holiday be offered "exclusively" to Pakistan, overcoming concerns that some options on the table would also have had to be offered to China and India.
Additionally, the the market access would be offered on a "time-limited" basis to "key imports". The debate now shifts to what time-limited means and what items will be on the list of key imports.
The French back an offering of just one year while the British take the wording to mean until 2014, when the GSP Plus scheme kicks in.
It is expected that Paris will want bed linens and carpets excluded from any agreement due to the success these industries have traditionally enjoyed in the Limoges region of the country.
The EU has so far announced some €230 million in emergency aid since the the floods struck. The bloc has also now agreed "significant additional humanitarian and development assistance."
Heading into the summit, the UK had argued that the EU needed to go well beyond the usual emergency disaster relief and even medium-to-long-term reconstruction aid for the country.
The British position chimes with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton's stated aim in the wake of the floods to develop a 10-year EU strategy that helps to stabilise the country's fragile democracy and economy.
German foreign minister Guido Westerwelle had also said last week that the aim was to stabilise the country and prevent a descent into "extremism and fundamentalism," the UK has been at the forefront of a push for a new deal for Pakistan.
UK Prime Minister David Cameron wrote a letter to EU Council President Herman Van Rompuy and other EU leaders ahead of the summit calling for a result on the matter to come out of the meeting.
London is particularly keen given its historic closeness to the country, once under British colonial rule, but the prime minister is also keen to deliver something substantial to Islamabad after his blunder last month accusing Pakistan of exporting terrorism.
It is thought that Mr Cameron had won the argument by forcefully pressing that the EU had to show the world that it was able to produce a result when leaders came to Brussels to meet.
Earlier in the week, one EU diplomat had described the substance of what had been scheduled to be discussed at the summit as "underwhelming". Since the coming passage of the Lisbon Treaty, the bloc's new institutional arrangement giving the EU a new permanent president of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, the president has encouraged a proliferation of summits beyond the traditional one every quarter.
"We have yet to be convinced of the need for more than four summits a year," a diplomat told reporters.
However, the most recent draft of a final statement coming out of the summit says simply mentioning what the bloc has already done.
Development NGOs cheered the result. Elise Ford, head of Oxfam's EU office, said: "Europe today stood out from the crowd and showed the political resolve that is needed when major humanitarian emergencies emerge."
Some 20 million people in Pakistan have been affected by the floods, twice the population of Belgium.