Canada isn’t recognizing enough specialty foods, Italian officials say
By Diego Flammini
Staff Writer
Farms.com
An important member of the European Union (EU) is refusing to sign a free trade deal with Canada.
The latter country does not recognize enough of Italy’s specialty food products; therefore, Italy will not be part of the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), Italian officials said. All 28 EU nations must sign off on the agreement before it can come into effect.
Italy has 292 food products that fall under a Protected Designation of Origin (P.D.O) or Protected Geographical Indication (P.G.I.) designation. These labels help guarantee the products are made with distinct characteristics that are native to the region or production process.
Canada recognized more than 40 of those products under CETA, but that number is not enough to warrant ratifying the trade agreement, said Luigi Di Maio, Italy’s deputy prime minister.
“Soon CETA will arrive in parliament and this majority will reject it and will not ratify it,” he told Coldiretti, an Italian farm organization that supports the government’s position, Reuters reports today.
Italian officials and organizations have discussed rejecting CETA for at least the last month.
“We will not ratify the free-trade treaty with Canada because it protects only a small part of our (P.D.O) and (P.G.I.) products,” Italy’s ag minister, Gian Marco Centinaio, told local newspaper La Stampa on June 14, Reuters reported.
Coldiretti called the trade agreement “wrong and risky” in a June statement, and estimated food exports could triple if food counterfeiting is taken seriously.
But Canadian negotiators remain confident Italy will agree on CETA’s terms.
“I’m confident we will have full ratification in the end, and the important thing is this agreement has entered into force as an economic matter,” Chrystia Freeland, Canada’s foreign affairs minister, told reporters in June.
Nine European countries, including Spain, Denmark and Croatia, have already ratified CETA.