Free Trade Focus

摘要

Amidst arguments over genetically modified foods, U.S. eavesdropping and other thorny issues, the EU is poised to strike its biggest trade deal. If hundreds of negotiators from 28 countries can just stay focused on the task at hand, they may achieve what some once thought impossible - the creation of the world's largest free trade area by the end of the year. The goal is to eliminate tariffs and reduce barriers on about half the world's output and a third of its trade activity. If the deal is struck and its particulars ratified, it would be the most significant trans-Atlantic trade development since the founding of the World Trade Organization nearly 20 years ago. But the road ahead remains long and fraught. It is littered both with legitimate issues of supply chain, markets and miss-matched regulatory regimes, and with periphery issues like the NSA spying scandals, which threaten to hijack the talks by their sheer effrontery.