EU-UK trade deal an "important step": German minister

BERLIN, April 28 (Xinhua) -- The European Parliament's approval of the trade agreement between the European Union (EU) and the United Kingdom (UK) was an "important step towards ensuring that the new agreement can enter into force still in May," said German Minister for Economic Affairs and Energy Peter Altmaier in a statement on Wednesday.

With the deal, "we want to increase legal certainty and reliability for both companies and citizens and thus strengthen our economic relations again. This is important for the EU, but also for the United Kingdom," said Altmaier.

After 11 months of intense negotiations on their future partnership, EU and UK negotiators reached the Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) in a last-ditch attempt with one week left before the transition period ended on Dec. 31, 2020.

To minimise disruption, the agreement has been provisionally applied since the beginning of this year, valid until the end of April.

Altmaier stressed that trade between the EU and the UK "declined sharply" recently, showing that "the economy needs reliable rules" and that a trade deal is important for both sides.

According to latest figures published by Eurostat, the EU's statistical office, in the first two months of 2021, exports from the bloc to the UK fell 20.2 percent compared to last year, while the EU's imports from the UK recorded an even sharper decrease of 47 percent.

Statistics from the Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) showed that Germany's trade with the UK also dropped significantly in the first two months of this year. In February, German exports to the UK fell 12.2 percent year-on-year, while imports plummeted 26.9 percent.

Since 2016, the year of the Brexit referendum, German exports to Britain have "steadily declined," Destatis noted at the beginning of March. German exports to Britain in 2020 declined to 66.9 billion euros (80.8 billion U.S. dollars), after 89.0 billion euros in 2015.