EU trade deal talks: Piyush Goyal lashes out at non-trade barriers in EU

NEW DELHI: India's commerce minister Piyush Goyal hinted Friday that New Delhi will not sign any free trade agreements with the EU if it insists on including issues like the carbon tax and deforestation regulations in the agreement, saying that no respectable country can have a free trade agreement with the EU unless the latter stops imposing its non-trade agenda into bilateral trade negotiations.

"My sense is, we'll be able to complete most of the discussions quite amicably," Goyal said in response to a particular question about the timeframe of the India-EU free trade agreement negotiations at the 9th Global Technology Summit, which was co-hosted by Carnegie India and the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA).

"The European Union will need to reconsider two areas," he said. They try to put these non-trade issues into the trade agenda, for example. "It [will be] very difficult to get a trade agreement with anybody, whatsoever, unless they get that out of their system and the European Commission has to think about it," he said.