The breaking news has been welcomed just days off the next Transatlantic trade and investment partnership (Tiip) meeting. Sale of counterfeit Italian products in the Us market has reached sad values.
“The issue – said the Consortium’s president and director Giuseppe Alai – is linked to import quotas, because their elimination from this market is not associated with a simultaneous strong protection of the name ‘Parmesan’, which in Europe is already protected and recognized as exclusively linked to parmigiano reggiano, which could paradoxically give rise to a parallel market, with hard cheese potentially produced in other European countries that, once in the Usa, could be labelled as ‘Parmesan’, perhaps with the addition of the Italian flag and other Italian sounding references”.
Moreover concerns related to counterfeit Italian Parmesan will be highlighted when Eu and Us officials negotiate the Transatlantic trade and investment partnership (Tiip) in Brussels. It is known that the US procurement market is about a seventh of the total economic size. In the Us, there are contrasting tides. Brussels views procurement as an ‘offensive’ area in the Tiip, because the Eu market is, legally speaking, more open than Us. All 28 Eu members states apply the World trade organization’s government procurement Act (Gpa) which lays out the market opening obligations of member states. By contrast, only 37 of the 50 Us states apply the Gpa. The aim of the Tiip is to go beyond the Gpa by opening up more government contracts to bids from other companies. It is easier for the Eu to reach this goal because the Commission has stronger authority to commit Eu countries to open up procurement. The Us administration must go to each US state to try to persuade it to sign. Us administration used to only have to persuade the governors of the states. Now, however, state legislatures are getting more resistant to liberalization. For example, in the most recent Free trade agreements (Ftas) that the Us concluded with Peru, Columbia and Panama only eight of the 50 states signed. In this scenario, the Tiip could also make the contracting process in the Us more transparent by creating a single platform and portal, for publishing contracts.
“The biggest growth potential for Eu firms,” noted Luisa Santos, director of the international relations at Business Europe, “lies with selling innovative products. On the other hand, the Eu market is far from being fully open to Us firms. For example, in its Gpa commitments, the Eu was more generous to the European free trade area (Efta) countries, such as Iceland, Lichtenstein, Norway and Switzerland. A starting point” – she added- “for the Us could be to demand access to part of what the Efta states have”.
