Eurasian Economic Commission Develops Technical Regulatory System With China
The Eurasian Economic Commission (EEC), the governing body of the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) Free Trade Bloc, has been holding meetings with China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) with the participation of experts from the Ministry of Ecology and Environment of China.
The meetings are significant as they are intended to bring together the two economic communities and to level the playing field in terms of trade standards. The EAEU includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia, and fills the geographic space between Eastern Europe and China. It includes part of the most heavily used transport corridors between China, Central Asia and Russia. China has a Free Trade Agreement with the EAEU, however as yet this is non-preferential, although discussions are taking place to change this. The EEC-SAMR meetings appear to be a way in which greater commonality can be achieved towards an eventual FTA.
The meeting was chaired by Tatiana Nikolaeva, Deputy Director of the EEC Technical Regulation and Accreditation Department, and Ma Wenxiu, Deputy Director General of the SAMR International Cooperation Department.
The two parties discussed issues of access to the markets of the EAEU and China for wheeled vehicles and chemical products. In particular, the Chinese side shared their experience in developing systems for registering new chemicals and maintaining a register of used chemicals, which is relevant in connection with the development of second-level documents to the technical regulation on the safety of chemical products in the EAEU.
The Chinese side proposed the possibility of mutual recognition of the results of conformity assessment between the PRC and the EAEU. China’s Department of Technical Regulation and Accreditation made a proposal to develop areas of cooperation in the field of ensuring the uniformity of measurements between the EAEU countries and the PRC.
The participants of the meeting agreed to exchange additional information on the discussed issues and establish working interaction between experts on specific topics.
The State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) was formed in the process of administrative reform in 2018 and is a market regulator with broad powers in various areas. Among them are food safety, competition protection and activities of monopolies, registration of market entities, industrial safety, standardisation, metrology, testing, inspections, conformity assessment, state supervision, quality control, and the formation of a national quality infrastructure.
This is highly relevant to Russia, the EAEU and China as Russia has a huge petrochemicals and agricultural industry with China a major client. In return, Russia wants Chinese technical manufacturing and IT support, with both sides needing to agree on their mutual standards and regulatory controls.
Source: the Eurasian Economic Commission
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