EU-Japan trade deal ‘within reach’

The European Union and Japan are close to reaching an agreement in principle on a free trade deal, the European Commission said. “We are almost there. We made a lot of very important progress,” European Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmström said after the latest round of meetings. The EU hopes that a political agreement, which would close negotiations on over 90 percent of the issues, could be signed this Thursday. Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida was still cautious about the deal’s success. “While there was meaningful progress in the negotiations, there are still important issues left for both sides to close,” he said. Japan has had concerns that food imports from Europe could significantly hurt its crumbling agricultural sector. But in the recent weeks, Tokyo implemented reforms aimed to boost Japanese farmers. On the other hand, EU wanted to keep its 10 percent tariff on cars. Two key parts of the trade deal would be excluded from the political accord — investment protection (Investment Court System to solve investor-state disputes) and data flows (sharing consumer data). A trade accord with the world's third-largest economy would be the European Union's biggest trade deal to date. The EU has forecast trade between the two could increase by a third, boosting the EU economy by 0.8 percent and Japan's by 0.3 percent over the long term. Japan is the EU’s sixth-biggest trading partner, and the two parties posted total trade of about €125 billion last year. Between them, the EU and Japan represent nearly 30 percent of the global gross domestic product.