Trump trade negotiator says EU talks are 'at a stalemate'

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said the United States has reached a "complete stalemate" with the EU over intractable agricultural demands, though Trump and European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker declared in a Rose Garden press conference last year that the two leaders had agreed to the makings of a deal.

"We're at a stalemate," Lighthizer told the Senate Finance Committee. "The United States can't have a trade agreement with Europe that doesn't deal with agriculture, and their view is that they can't have one that does," he said.

The Rose Garden comments last July de-escalated tensions stemming from Trump's imposition of steel and aluminum tariffs and subsequent retaliatory tariffs from the EU on a range of American products -- as well as Trump's still-looming threat to slap tariffs on European cars.

In some ways, the preliminary European deal was quite narrow. It applied a "zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers, and zero subsidies" goal only to non-auto industrial goods, and a joint statement from Trump and Juncker at the time made no mention of agricultural products beyond soybeans.

Yet Lighthizer included an array of ambitious agriculture goals in January when the United States released its negotiating objectives for the potential trade agreement.

Agricultural products were a point of major contention during negotiations for the Obama-era Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, and the EU is adamant about avoiding the historically tricky subject altogether.

"We have been very clear that from the EU side that we will not discuss agriculture," European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström said in January.

Lighthizer and Malmström met again on March 6, but the pair don't appear any closer to a solution on the issue.

"We're at a complete stalemate with them," Lighthizer reiterated during his testimony on Tuesday. "We're working on other areas with the realization that there's not going to be any [free trade agreement] without agriculture."

Lighthizer said pressure from Congress to open up the EU market to American farmers is strong enough that a deal without agricultural provisions would be dead on arrival.

"It wouldn't even make any difference if we conceded or not," he said.