"The TTIP negotiation has failed. Europe cannot accept American requests”. So yesterday Sigmar Gabriel, German vice-chancellor and economy minister, has placed a tombstone on the "Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership", the controversial free trade treaty between Europe and the United States.
In an interview with the German network Zdf, the social democratic politician explained that, after 14 rounds of talks and no agreement on any chapter of the 27 planned, now "there will be no more breakthrough, even if nobody wants to admit it”.
Given the opposition of many Germans to the TTIP agreement, some commentators believe that Gabriel's statements are only a political move in view of the elections in Germany.
Yet the negotiations on the agreement, which began in 2013, have never had an easy life and the first step backwards had already come from the France: “There is absolutely no possibility that an agreement will be reached by the end of the Obama administration – said the French Deputy Minister of Foreign Trade, Matthias Fekl, at the beginning of July -. I think everyone knows it by now, even those who claim otherwise."
Even the Italian Minister of Economic Development, Carlo Calenda, had admitted that the agreement on the TTIP is destined to fail: "We have now gone too far on the negotiation".
The criticisms against the treaty that was supposed to create the largest free trade area on the planet (over 800 million people involved) have always been many. The best-known controversy is the one against the Isds clause (Investor-State Dispute Settlement), which would have allowed multinationals to sue individual countries before an arbitration court to challenge laws (including those on health or the environment) potentially harmful to their profits.
Furthermore, according to some critics, the TTIP would have put them at risk public services and welfare, favoring their privatisation, and would have damaged the European small and medium-sized enterprises, which could hardly have faced competition from US multinationals.
From the point of view of the consumers, on the other hand, the danger was linked to the fact that in the United States for a series of products the precautionary principle that is in force in Europe for the protection of health and the environment does not apply, i.e. in America the risk assessment does not take place before placing on the market. This could have had consequences for the spread of GMOs, hormone-treated meat, pesticides and more in the EU.
