EU trade commissioner Karel De Gucht warned Tuesday that special export favours granted to Brazil, China, India and Russia among scores of fast-growing economies no longer "make sense." De Gucht told a news conference at the European Parliament in Strasbourg that countries classified by the World Bank as "higher or upper-middle income countries," also including Malaysia, Qatar, Saudi Arabia or Thailand, are now so well-off that they should be stripped of decades-old EU trade preferences.
"Their income is similar or even higher than that of some EU member states. So we thought that trade preferences did make that much sense any more," De Gucht said after the European Union executive backed his plan to prune radically a decades-old list of General System of Preferences (GSP) beneficiaries. The Belgian EU commissioner said "the world has changed since this system was introduced in the 1970s and so too has the pattern of international trade. And so should our policies.