The European Union plans to set a duty-free import quota for sugar from Macedonia to curb an unwanted supply flow and replace the unlimited EU access that the country enjoys now, documents showed on Wednesday.
The quota, for 7,000 tonnes of sugar each year, will have to be approved by EU member states before it can enter into force.
Macedonia joins three western Balkan countries where the EU has imposed sugar quotas to avoid repeats of previous customs scams where preferential access caused shipments to soar.
The special trade deals were designed to boost the economic recovery of the western Balkans region devastated by 1990s wars.
But one problem of the free Balkan access was a tendency for some of these countries to send their entire national sugar production to EU markets and meet domestic needs with imported sugar, especially cheaper cane sugar from Brazil.
Albania now has an annual sugar quota of 1,000 tonnes, while 12,000 tonnes is the limit for Bosnia and Herzegovina. The quota for Serbia and Montenegro, including Kosovo, is 180,000 tonnes.
Quotas for Croatia and Macedonia must be negotiated separately since both countries have association agreements with the EU, making their trading status different.
While the Commission was keen to start negotiating a sugar quota with Croatia, it had yet to receive authority from EU member states to do so, a Commission official told Reuters.