Hague: Describing it as a necessary measure, the Netherlands Trade Minister Sjoerd Sjoerdsma on Monday said he did not expect any renegotiation of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM).
However, he said the Netherlands was helping Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) understand the rules and make compliance easier.
When asked if the European Union (EU) would rethink CBAM as it would make imports expensive, he said: "I don't think there will be any renegotiation of CBAM because we view it as a necessary measure to ensure that we stick to the goals that the entire world agreed to, the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement."
"We believe that this is an essential instrument to ensure that not only we but the entire world adheres to these goals," he told reporters here on the sidelines of the India-Netherlands Business Forum.
The EU's CBAM is designed to impose a carbon cost on imports of certain carbon-intensive goods, including iron and steel, aluminium, cement, fertilisers, electricity and hydrogen.
He added that the Netherlands is one of the few countries that invests a lot in helping small and medium-sized enterprises in countries like India and other partners to help explain the CBAM rules and to make sure that it becomes easier to comply with them.
"Because we do see, of course, the difficulty in some of these guidelines. Some of them are quite complex to follow, and if you have a small company, you have a lot of other things to do. Then just read all those guidelines. We're helping these people out," he said.
These remarks are important as Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal has recently stated that the EU is "inviting disaster" by imposing a carbon tax on its steel products.
Goyal in the Forum said that the EU is over burdening its businesses by these regulations.
On this, Sjoerdsma said that the European Commission is currently implementing an agenda of deregulation.
"At the same time, certain rules and regulations are also crucial to protect the consumers of the European Union. When it comes to climate, when it comes to the quality of products, when it comes to the security and safety of products, these are rules that very much benefit the consumers of the European market," he said.
"And of course, we should keep those rules," he said.
However, he added that rules that are not necessary and that hinder trade unnecessarily, "we need to look at them when it comes to regulation".
On areas of cooperation between the two countries, he said the Netherlands is a world leader when it comes to the semiconductor industry through companies like ASML.
"There's also a unique new cooperation between ASML and Tata in India, building a new fab, and I think this will be the first building stone of what will be a major new part of our economic relationship, based on the semicon," he said.