This is from Inside US Trade:
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker and German Economic Minister Sigmar Gabriel on Monday (April 25) each blamed the other side for holding up progress in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations, with Gabriel charging the U.S. with intransigence on government procurement and investor-state dispute settlement.
In contrast, Pritzker more generally hinted that the European Union is not as committed to the TTIP negotiations as the Obama administration, which wants to conclude the agreement by the end of this year. “Both sides need to work with urgency,” she said. “We would like to see the negotiations finish this year, but ... it takes two to make a deal.”
Pritzker stressed that there is “a cost to waiting” to get this deal done, but that this does not mean the U.S. is interested in a limited deal on tariffs only. “Cutting a deal that will only lower tariffs is not going to be of interest,” Pritzker said. “TTIP light is not something that either the Europeans or the U.S. is interested in.”
...
Gabriel also made clear he does not support a scaled-back TTIP. “I am not a fan of [TTIP light],” he said in an April 24 interview with the German newspaper Handelsblatt. A transcript of the entire interview is posted on his ministry's website. “I am looking to get a good deal, not a deal at all costs.”
So nobody wants a TTIP-light. Got it.
But what about this:
European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom has said the EU will seek to protect its most sensitive agricultural products, such as certain dairy products and poultry, from complete tariff liberalization under the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP).
"When it comes to very sensitive sectors in the agriculture [industry], milk is one of these, poultry could be another, they would be exempted from the complete tariff liberalization," Malmstrom said at a civil society event on Feb. 3. "We are not there yet to define these."
Malmstrom, speaking at a civil society event on Feb. 3, also said member states are developing lists of products that will be exempt from full tariff elimination. Milk is on this list, she said, but added that she could not identify other items because the negotiations have not yet reached that stage.
Fluid milk is not heavily traded internationally, although milk powders are. Malmstrom's reference to milk was likely a reference to the dairy sector more broadly.
At the 11th TTIP round in October 2015 in Miami, the U.S. and EU exchanged tariff offers that covered 97 percent of their tariff lines. Of the tariff lines covered in the EU's latest offer, 1 percent are agriculture products that would be subject to phaseout periods of longer than seven years.
The remaining 3 percent of the EU's tariffs are also comprised mostly of agricultural products. The U.S. has maintained that all tariffs should be eliminated under TTIP, although many of its free trade deals -- including the Trans-Pacific Partnership -- have not lived up to that ambition.
Or this:
A senior U.S. official said March 31 that the U.S. has no intention of submitting a revised government procurement offer to the European Union this summer in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations, despite a request by EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom that it do so.
The U.S. official said that negotiators just exchanged offers, a reference to Feb. 29, and need to work on that basis. He made clear that he considers the U.S. offer to have met the agreed upon TTIP objective of increasing market access, and signaled the U.S. does not have to offer as much procurement access in TTIP as the EU since the U.S. market is twice as open.
He said the "narrative" of EU officials that the EU market is more open than the U.S. is false. In criticizing the U.S. procurement offer, EU officials in early March made that argument.
The EU is faulting the U.S. procurement offer for not offering new market access to railway and urban transit projects and aviation safety contracts, which are its priorities. The U.S. offer did not cover procurement undertaken by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), which could be construction project or equipment used in airtraffic control, sources said.