Wholly Obtained

FTA / RoO

Rule of origin requiring a product to be entirely produced in one country with no imported materials.

Sources

1. European Commission, DG TAXUD — Preferential rules of origin taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu accessed 23 September 2026
2. European Commission, DG TAXUD — Non-preferential rules of origin taxation-customs.ec.europa.eu accessed 23 September 2026

Wholly obtained is the simpler of the two routes to originating status, and the Commission states it compactly: goods must either “be ‘wholly obtained’, that means manufactured from raw materials or components grown or produced in the EU or in the beneficiary country, or undergo sufficient working or processing”. Nothing non-originating may have gone into a wholly obtained good — that is what makes the test clean and also what makes it unavailable to most manufactured products. It is worth knowing that the same two-concept structure carries over into the EU’s non-preferential rules, which apply to all goods imported into the EU and decide questions that have nothing to do with tariff preference: most-favoured-nation treatment, anti-dumping and countervailing duties, embargoes and sanctions, safeguards, quotas, trade statistics, public tenders and origin marking.

Whose rules these are. The pages cited are the European Commission’s, so what they state is the EU’s position and the EU’s practice. Origin criteria are set by each arrangement’s own origin protocol, and another customs territory may define the same concept differently — the Commission says as much of its non-preferential rules, which “may be different from those of a third country”. Read the protocol that governs your shipment; this entry explains the concept the protocol will use.

Related terms

• Absorption Principle
• Bilateral Cumulation
• Certificate of Origin
• Change in Tariff Classification
• Cumulation
• Diagonal Cumulation

From the AJG lexicon archive (July 2026).