Biden and Ursula von der Leyen, agreement on duties: breath of fresh air for agriculture
The agreement reached yesterday between the European Union and the United States, to suspend the policy of tariffs on EU and US exports imposed in the disputes over Airbus and Boeing, was welcomed with great satisfaction especially by the agricultural world, the one most affected by the duties imposed by the Usai . The announcement was made by the President of the Commission herself, Ursula von der Leyen, at the end of a telephone conversation with the US president, Joe Biden. By laying the foundations to end a long and controversial issue that had arisen well before Trump, but which had been amplified in the years of the Donald’s presidency, which made the defense of American products a mantra of his policy.
The Airbus-Boeing dispute dates back to 2004 when George W. Bush was in the White House. Over time, Europeans and Americans have accused each other of having helped their aeronautical giants with public subsidies. The international trade tribunal at the World Trade Organization (WTO) practically agreed with both of them, establishing that both aeronautics giants had been aided by their respective states. The result is that both Washington and Brussels have felt entitled to unleash reprisals, and these have hit a range of products that go far beyond aeronautics in the form of tariffs. In all, the United States had hit $ 7.5 billion in annual imports from Europe, and the European Union reacted with tariffs on 4 billion US-made products.
US duties had been applied to a large number of agricultural products such as French wine, Italian cheese and Spanish olive oil. And it is for this reason that this agreement is greeted with great favor by a sector, such as the agri-food sector, which for months has had to deal with the difficulties created by the hiccup closures of the Horeca channel, which represent about one third of the sector’s turnover. . “This is the renewed EU-US partnership we have been waiting for for some time,” S&D MEP Paolo De Castro, from the agriculture commission in Brussels, wrote on Twitter.