resume trade talks with India, while putting its investment pact with China on the backburner suggests that Brussels is not taking any chances and playing it safe, the Indian Foreign Minister says.
“[COVID] has raised issues of transparency, it has raised issues of trust, it has created concern about reliable supply chains,” Minister S. Jaishankar told POLITICO magazine, in an indirect reference to overdependence on China. “So, I think that Europe is looking at strategic autonomy, looking at a multipolar world, which is actually hedging its risk. Mitigating its risk,” he added.
The Minister further noted that although trade talks for an FTA cannot be concluded overnight, however, now there is “a more than decent possibility” of success.
“The politics is changing. I would say the chemistry of it is changing,” he pointed out. “We have to restructure the world, reengineer the world, taking a pandemic kind of situation as a constant.”
During his interview, the minister also discussed the production and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, calling on European nations which oppose to the vaccine waiver to change their minds.
“We feel [patents] cannot and should not be addressed with ‘business as normal’. What we asking for is something temporary, something specific,” he said. “We need to make it easier to produce, easier to produce both in terms of the regulatory and patents side, but also we need to make it easier to produce in terms of raw materials and the supply chain.”
