In addition to the comments, Chris Jahn, President and CEO of the American Chemistry Council (ACC), and Steve Elliott, Director General of the Chemical Industries Association (CIA), made the following statement: Mercosur is an important trading partner for the EU chemical industry, with annual chemical exports worth €6.3 billion. The trade agreement will allow for steady growth in trade between the two regions and win-win situations. We call on the European Parliament and EU Member States to approve the agreement so that EU industry can reap the benefits of liberalised trade. But Steve Woolcock, who teaches the political economy of international trade at Britain`s London School of Economics, proposes that concerns about these trade deals, which allow contentious U.S. companies to challenge regulation, are exaggerated. “This fear is exaggerated,” he tells Chemistry World. “I can`t imagine the European Parliament relaxing EU environmental legislation because of the threat that an American company could present a case.” The current differences between the UK and EU approaches increase the likelihood of a no-trade deal at the end of 2020. In this scenario, Northern Ireland would remain in REACH, while a new UK regime would come into force in the rest of the country. This would be significantly lower than and deviate from the high level of protection currently enjoyed by the UK under the EU`s international gold standard for chemicals regulation. For example, in the U.S.-South Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS), certain chemicals require manufacturing processes such as cleaning, chemical reaction, controlled mixing, particle size changes, or other technical tests like this to take place in one or two parts of the FTA to give the origin.

It is clear that a US-UK trade deal is likely to reintroduce many of the controversial elements that emerged during the EU-US trade negotiations on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). In addition, the negotiations will likely take place amid an aggressive trade approach by the Trump administration, persistent divisions in the UK parliament and reflect the reality that the UK is in a weaker negotiating position than the EU due to its smaller size. The spokesman for the American Society of Chemical Manufacturers and Affiliates, Bill Allmond, also testified that U.S. chemical manufacturers face challenges in many foreign markets due to “costly and heavy regulatory barriers.”