Maroš Šefčovič

But it's a challenge.

It brings additional instability into how the global supply chain has been working.

And therefore, my message to the European industry is you have to be prepared

to pay security premium we have to stockpile we have to diversify because we learned the hard way how the dependencies are costly and therefore we included it into this new look new communication on economic security because we just simply have to be much better in managing these emergencies

Clearly, I would say the deficit of 300 billion is way too high.

This was the topic which was raised by me with my counterparts from the moment one when I first time came for the visit to China.

And I think that there's also a very clear message from our side that we will fight to the nail for our European jobs and European companies.

And to have the deficit of 300 billion on a permanent basis is unsustainable.

So we are looking at different possibilities how to address this issue.

Maybe one interesting information for you would be that we set up such as import surveillance task force which are monitoring

I would say the inflows of the goods on a biweekly basis.

And this is what constitutes, I would say, the basis for our next steps.

I think that before we went to the strongest instrument in our arsenal, what would be very important for us would be to see the tendencies.

Are the European companies in China treated fairly?

access you know to some of the programs and public procurement how the issue of the handling of overcapacity is happening and if the investments are done in the EU are the real investment are we talking about the IPR transfer are we talking about creating real value-added in Europe are we talking about creation of the of the real job so what would be very important is the tendency

And I would say engagement with us to address these issues which we are raising with our Chinese counterparts really already for quite some time.

They're going to use every minute of this week to get it done because I think to end this turbulent year from the perspective of such a global trader like European Union with the biggest free trade agreement ever signed, I think would be a positive conclusion to this year.

That's a big deal with lots of opportunities for

not only European exporters but also in the field of critical raw minerals accessibility and I'm sure that in the end it would be very positive deal also for our agri-food industry which is paying very high tariffs if they try to export anything to Mercosur.

So we really very diligently listened to our farmers community and I believe that we found the responses to every single concern they had.