Africa, Development & Aid, Economy & Trade, Europe, Headlines, Poverty & SDGs, Trade & Investment, Trade and poverty: Facts beyond theory

TRADE-AFRICA: EPAs Under Fire From European Parliamentarians

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Nov 30 2007 (IPS) - No fanfare was made in Brussels in the past week over European Union officials’ breakthrough in the trade talks on economic partnership agreements (EPAs) with almost 80 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries.

For, while interim deals have been reached with nine countries, doubts persist over whether a full range of accords can be secured before a December 31 deadline set by the European Union (EU).

Five East African countries – Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania – signed an agreement with the EU on November 27. A few days earlier, the Southern African states of Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique gave their assent to a similar deal.

The EU’s executive, the European Commission, claims that its offer in the EPA negotiations is the most generous ever proposed as part of trade talks. The ACP, it says, would be allowed to sell their goods free of duties or quotas to the EU from next year. Sugar and rice would be the only exceptions.

This has done little to assuage the concerns of anti-poverty activists, who point out that any gains from greater exports to the EU could be eclipsed by the damage done by the largely reciprocal market openings that ACP countries would have to undertake.

These would allow subsidised European food products, with which local producers would be in no position to compete, to effectively swamp the ACP markets. Under the interim deals with East Africa, for example, taxes on two-thirds of imports from the EU would be eliminated.

Although the Commission has given assurances that the EPAs will be a tool for promoting regional integration in Africa, its critics argue that its tactics could be undermining that objective.

The interim agreements with Southern Africa have been reached, without South Africa or Namibia yet on board, although Angola has signalled it could soon join an agreement.

And in negotiations with a West African regional grouping, the EU side has indicated it may sign a separate deal with Ivory Coast without its neighbours. Both the West and Central African groupings in the talks have not yet presented the Commission with formal offers on questions of market access.

Glenys Kinnock, a veteran member of the European Parliament (MEP), said she had ‘‘never encountered the kind of pressure that the ACP has faced during these negotiations’’.

Accusing the Commission of ‘‘intransigence and lack of flexibility’’, she argued that it is ‘‘threatening regional integration and causing regional tensions’’.

Ján Figel, a member of the European Commission, said this week that EU officials have taken ‘‘a pragmatic and flexible approach’’. Nonetheless, Figel, who was deputising for Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson, warned ACP governments that they risk having considerably higher taxes imposed on their exports to the EU if they do not conclude EPAs by the end of the year.

But Marc Maes, a trade specialist with Belgian anti-poverty group 11.11.11, said that the Commission had hardened its position during the negotiations.

Whereas it had indicated that ACP countries would be allowed a 25-year transition period for opening up their markets to most European imports, this period has been shortened to a maximum of 15 years in many cases. ‘‘The Commission has been moving the goalposts,’’ he told IPS.

He noted that EU governments earlier this month issued a call to the Commission to display flexibility in the talks. ‘‘The Commission has not offered maximum flexibility,’’ he said. ‘‘It has been constantly raising the stakes.’’

The international non-governmental organisation Oxfam’s Luis Morago said: ‘‘The way these negotiations have been conducted so far is inimical to development.

‘‘Countries that are massively dependent on the EU as a market for their goods and as a major aid donor are being told they must either sign deals now that involve drastic liberalisation or face an increase in tariffs from January next year that would devastate their export industries. This is not fair negotiation but brinkmanship.’’

All of the deals signed this year are expected to be limited to trade in goods. Negotiations aimed at expanding the EPAs to cover investment, competition, services, public procurement and intellectual property could continue into 2008.

Although many ACP countries have been opposed to having negotiations that cover such an extensive range of issues, the Commission only agreed in October to restrict discussions for the remainder of this year to trade in goods.

In an exchange of views with Figel, the German Green MEP Frithjof Schmidt said: ‘‘It is astonishing to hear you talking about the negotiations as though everything has gone well for the Commission.

‘‘In truth, the negotiations have been overburdened by the Commission. The ‘goods only’ announcement was a confession of the Commission’s failings and it was too little, too late. Your strategy has been a mistake,’’ Schmidt said.

French Socialist Harlem Désir argued that the EU threat of increasing tariffs on ACP goods in the absence of agreements is a ‘‘type of blackmail’’.

Helmuth Markov, a German left-wing MEP, branded the EU’s tactics as ‘‘a catastrophe’’, arguing that the overriding concern of officials was to prise open ACP markets to Western businesses.

‘‘Partnership means respect,’’ he said. ‘‘When we Europeans can still have an attitude of ‘take it or leave it’, it has nothing to do with partnership.’’