Thirteen years is a long time to negotiate a trade agreement.
For anyone who hasn't been in Thailand long, the reason this still isn't done matters. Talks on the Thai-EU FTA opened in 2013 and stopped after the 2014 coup. The EU's June 2014 Council conclusions suspended official visits and refused to sign the Partnership and Cooperation Agreement (PCA) until a democratically elected government was in office. The FTA was put on hold with it. Political contacts didn't resume until 2017, and the deal went back on the table in October 2019 after the election, with the relaunch in 2023. 15 of 24 chapters are now closed and Thailand wants the rest by year end. From the Thai side the urgency makes complete sense.
The complaint is not about tariffs
Noel Clehane from the EU-ASEAN Business Council gives the other half of it in Nad Bunnag's piece for Thai PBS World. He is not pointing at tariffs, he is pointing at customs handling, the Foreign Business Act (FBA), and the roughly 7,600 ministerial regulations he describes as redundant, out of date or inconsistent with each other.
Changing those is slow and sensitive work and the FBA dates from 1999. The carve-outs everyone cites as evidence of reform were approved in principle by Cabinet in April 2025, presented by the DBD in January of this year, approved in principle again in May, and still have no legal effect until they appear in the Royal Gazette. What the European business side is asking for is predictability of standards rather than a signature, and on a timetable they can plan against. Those are administrative fixes rather than negotiating positions.
Two complaints that are the same complaint
The piece's traceability warning and the regulatory complaint sit in the same place. An exporter can document its own shipments. What it cannot fix alone is the export certification and customs paperwork around them, which is on Clehane's own list of what is not working. Thai economist Pavida Pananond is asking for the value chain analysis to come from the government rather than from firms. Those are not two stories.
There seems to be plenty of political will to adapt; however, the value of the agreement will depend on a process that has moved slower than the negotiation itself.
Singapore and Vietnam already have their EU agreements in force. That is where the comparison gets made for a European company weighing market entry in Thailand. Until it is in force, none of this is something an exporter can build a price or a contract around.