(Adnkronos) – With the presentation of two measures to follow up on the agreement reached with the US, the European Commission has guaranteed that US duties on cars and components produced in the EU will retroactively drop to 15% starting from August 1st compared to the 27.5% currently applied. The EU executive announces this in a statement, relaunched on X by the EU Commissioner for Trade and chief negotiator, Maros Sefcovic, who “particularly welcomes” the cap on US tariffs on cars, calling it “a relief and a boost for our industry”.
The Commission’s first proposal provides for the elimination of duties on US industrial goods and preferential access to the European market for a series of US fish products and non-sensitive agricultural products, while the second concerns the extension of the duty exemption for lobster, now also extended to processed lobster, explains the EU executive in a statement, stressing that it will continue “to engage with the United States to further reduce duties, also in the context of negotiations on a future EU-US Agreement for reciprocal, fair and balanced trade”.
These are two measures explicitly provided for in the Joint Declaration with which the EU and the US formalized the agreement on duties reached at the end of July in Scotland. They “constitute the necessary legislative step to implement the EU tariff reductions provided for in Section 1”, underlines the Commission, recalling that the US in return has committed to bringing duties on cars and components to 15% in the same month in which the EU started the legislative procedure to remove its own tariffs. The reduction “will allow manufacturers to save over 500 million euros in duties in a single month”, highlights the EU executive.
“The United States has also agreed to apply zero or near-zero duties to certain product categories, to which only the ‘most favoured nation’ (MFN) rate will apply from now on, starting from September 1, 2025. These include: unavailable natural resources, including cork; all aircraft and related parts; generic drugs, their active ingredients and chemical precursors,” the Commission recalls, adding that Washington and Brussels “have agreed to further expand the list of products concerned in the future”.
The Joint Declaration provides that the EU will eliminate duties “on all US industrial goods” and guarantee preferential access to its market “for a wide range of US fish and agricultural products, including: nuts, dairy products, fresh and processed fruit and vegetables, processed foods, seeds, soybean oil and pork and bison meat”. The text also provided for the extension of the measures to processed lobster. “The European Parliament and the Council will now have to approve the two proposals according to the ordinary legislative procedure before the tariff reductions can enter into force,” the Commission underlines.
