EU Suspends Trade Preferences for Bosnia

Bosnian farmers will now have to pay tarrifs if they want to export their produce to the EU market after January 1, after Brussels suspended a trade liberalisation deal.

"The European Parliament decided ... to suspend the trade preferences granted unilaterally by the EU to Bosnia and Herzegovina," Zora Stanic, the spokesperson of the EU delegation in Sarajevo, told BIRN on Tuesday.

"These preferences have been officially suspended from January 1 until the EU and Bosnia and Herzegovina have signed and provisionally applied an agreement on the adaptation of trade concessions in the SAA," she explained.

The EU has adopted trade liberalisation agreements with countries in the Western Balkans wishing to join the EU in order to speed up their economic integration.

Trade between the EU and Bosnia has been governed since the signing of an SAA and an Interim Agreement in 2008 by this asymmetric liberalisation.

Since then, Bosnia has enjoyed almost completely free access to the EU market, exporting all categories of products there without fees. Only sugar, wine, fish and baby beef are subject to quotas.

Since Croatia joined the EU in July 2013, however, Brussels has been asking Bosnia to update the SAA in order to take account of traditional economic relation between the two countries under the Central European Free Trade Agreement, CEFTA. This means updating the economic quotas included in the SAA.

So far, however, Bosnia has refused to review the terms of the SAA, claiming that this would damage its economy.

"The EU claims that we will not suffer from an update of the SAA because we have been trading with Croatia in the past. This is true, but Croatia benefits from more European subsidies for agriculture than Bosnia, and in...