eKathimerini — European Council President Donald Tusk said it was still possible CETA could be signed as planned and Canada’s trade minister said the deal was “not dead”.
But Belgium has said it cannot back the deal because three French-speaking parts of the country oppose it.
CETA needs the support of all 28 EU nations before it can be approved.
It is the EU’s most ambitious free trade deal to date, and has been in the pipeline for seven years. The other 27 EU governments want to sign the agreement.
What would Ceta mean for Greece
One of the concerns expressed by Athens over CETA was that the agreement would lead to Canadian producers being able to manufacture feta and drive Greek firms out of the market.
Feta was not among the long list of European products with geographical indications that would be guaranteed protection across the Atlantic as the deal allowed Canadian companies already producing feta to continue doing so rather than revert to “feta-style” products. What producers in Europe see as a legitimate way of protecting products, and therefore livelihoods, from particular regions is viewed as protectionism by others.
In 2005 the European Court of Justice reaffirmed that feta was a name reserved for cheese from Greece as it had been registered as a protected designation of origin by the European Commission in 2002.
But in 2014, as part of trade talks, the European Union proposed to ban the use of European names like parmesan, feta and gruyere on cheese made in the United States andCanada.
Greek feta exports rose 85 % between 2007 and 2014 to 260 million euros, and sales to countries outside the EU more than doubled.
In 2011, the total annual value of feta exports reached just over 250 million euros. After a series of steady increases, exports of Greece’s national cheese were worth almost 370 million euros last year (Canada was the 14th largest importer, buying 3.9 million euros’ worth of feta). This upsurge seems even more impressive when one considers how Greek exports have struggled in recent years, when increasing taxes, a lack of liquidity, political uncertainty and currency risk have damaged so many local firms.
Last week New Democracy MEP Manolis Kefalogiannis told a group of Greek journalists in Brussels that the conservative party (whose leader Kyriakos Mitsotakis favours liberal economic policies) would vote against CETA in the European Parliament if the deal is concluded.
