Philippines | Brussels, 17 March 2017

On 22 December 2015, the EU and the Philippines officially announced the launch of negotiations for an EU-Philippines Free Trade Agreement (FTA). Following the conclusion of trade talks with Singapore and Vietnam in 2014 and 2015, the aim would be to conclude an agreement of a similar level of ambition and coverage.

Negotiations for a region-to-region FTA between the EU and ASEAN were launched in 2007 and paused in 2009 to give way to a bilateral format of negotiation. Bilateral FTA negotiations were launched with Singapore and Malaysia in 2010 and later with Vietnam in 2012, Thailand in 2013, the Philippines in 2015 and Indonesia in 2016. The aim is for bilateral FTAs with individual ASEAN countries to serve as building blocks towards a future region-to-region agreement.

As with other ASEAN countries before, a joint scoping exercise was conducted with the Philippines to determine the scope and the level of ambition of a future FTA. The exercise was successfully concluded in October 2015 and in November 2015 the Council authorised the Commission to start the negotiations. The first round of negotiations took place in Brussels in May 2016 and the second round of talks took place in Cebu City (Philippines) in February 2017.

On the EU side, negotiations are led by the European Commission Directorate General (DG) for Trade under the leadership of the Chief Negotiator Peter Berz, with the support of experts from other parts of the Commission.

More information

EU text proposals:

The EU has submitted the following text proposals to the Philippines as a basis for discussion. These texts only constitute EU's initial proposals for legal texts on topics in the EU-Philippines FTA and the EU reserves the right to make subsequent changes to the text by editing, supplementing or removing, at any time, all or part of the text. For explanatory purposes, text proposals are published accompanied by short factsheets on the different topics.

The actual text in the final agreement will be the result of negotiations between the EU and the Philippines. The full text of the final agreement will be made public once negotiations have been concluded – well in advance of its signature and ratification.

Reports of the negotiations rounds: Second round, February 2017 First round, June 2016