First meeting of the UfM Regional Platform on Trade and Investment

14 July 2021. The Member States of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) convened by videoconference in a meeting of the UfM Regional Platform on Trade and Investment (formerly known as the UfM Trade Senior Officials Meeting), chaired by teh UfM Co-Presidency of the European Commission and Jordan. The meeting followed up on the 11th UfM Trade Ministers Conference held in November 2020, and  agreed a Work Programme for the coming period focused around three main pillars:

• Sustainable Trade: participants reviewed the EU Trade Policy Review, the main findings of a study for an ex-post evaluation of the trade component of the Euro-Mediterranean Association Agreements between the EU and six partner countries (Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco and Tunisia), as well as the results of an EIB enterprise survey on trade, internationalisation, innovation and climate change preparedness.

• Sustainable Investment: participants discussed the latest developments on the EU investment policy, and progress on the implementation of the EU-OECD Programme on Investment in the Mediterranean.

• Regional Integration: participants reviewed the EU support to trade and investment in the Southern Neighbourhood for the period 2021-2027, and the state of play on the Modernization of Pan-Euro-Mediterranean rules of origin. The UfM Secretariat presented the first edition of the UfM Progress Report on Regional Integration, which provides key findings and policy recommendations in five domains: trade, finance, infrastructure, movement of people, and research and higher education, along with specific performance indicators that can be used to monitor trends and progress over time.

The UfM Secretariat, with the financial support of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH (GIZ) on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development of Germany (BMZ), announced the organization of the third edition of the UfM Trade and Investment forum on 11 November 2021 (virtually).

The UfM Member States agreed to hold the next meeting of the UfM Regional Platform on Trade and Investment on 1 December 2021 by videoconference.