BRUSSELS — The European Fee will ask the Donald Trump administration to exempt a listing of delicate EU items starting from whiskies by to medical tools from U.S. tariffs, in line with a 27-page checklist seen by POLITICO.
Pasta, cheese, wines and spirits, in addition to olive oil and sun shades, are among the many precedence sectors that Brussels desires Washington to protect from greater tariffs, together with diamonds, instruments, steel pipes, ship engine elements, industrial tools, materials, sneakers, hats, ceramics and industrial robots.
The want checklist was finalized Friday by EU international locations and will likely be introduced to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Commerce Consultant Jamieson Greer at a gathering with the bloc’s commerce ministers on Monday, POLITICO beforehand reported.
These delicate export sectors weren’t coated underneath the commerce deal struck in July by Trump and Fee President Ursula von der Leyen at his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland.
The deal, detailed in a joint assertion the next month, exempted some objects, similar to plane and generic medicine, however imposed a 15 p.c tariff on most different European exports, whereas the EU dedicated to scrap its tariffs on U.S. industrial items fully.
The EU’s pitch for tariff aid comes simply as Trump is pivoting away from the across-the-board tariffs he imposed on U.S. buying and selling companions earlier this yr, following a string of off-year election defeats for Republican candidates during which the rising value of residing swayed voters.
Every week in the past, he struck down “reciprocal tariffs” on greater than 200 items worldwide, together with merchandise utilized in fertilizer, tropical fruits like bananas and pineapples, espresso and several other spices like cocoa, cinnamon and coriander.
In his newest transfer, Trump on Thursday eradicated tariffs on a big swath of Brazilian agricultural items, together with beef and low, dropping the extra, punitive tariffs he imposed this summer time as he feuded with Brazil’s authorities and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The EU’s ask to raise tariffs on pasta is especially delicate in Italy, the place the trade is reeling from the Trump administration’s menace to impose 92 p.c tariffs from January in an anti-dumping case, on high of the 15 p.c already in power — a degree so excessive as to ban exports to the US.
This story has been up to date.