DEVELOPMENT: Spare This EU Paternalism

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

David Cronin

BRUSSELS, Jan 11 2008 (IPS) - When Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade refused to sign a free trade accord put forward by the European Union last month, he urged that an alternative “partnership deprived of paternalism and without prejudice” be sought.

Wade cemented his position as the African leader most vocally opposed to the EU’s proposed Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with Africa through a protest rally he called in Brussels Jan. 11.

It served as a reminder that while a Dec. 31 deadline for reaching EPAs with nearly 80 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries may have passed, the tensions engendered during negotiations last year are still raw. Wade had argued that the EU’s inflexible stance in the talks meant that relations between the EU and Africa were dysfunctional.

So far 35 ACP governments have accepted the EPAs, most of which have been labelled ‘interim’ agreements as they are restricted to trade in goods. Discussions on extending them to liberalisation of services and to cover new rules on investment are to continue.

In all of the deals secured so far, ACP countries will be required to eliminate the tariffs they apply on at least 80 percent of imports from Europe, sparking concerns that already vulnerable economies will be damaged by a deluge of foreign goods.

Like Senegal, most West African countries had asked for the end-of-year deadline to be extended. After the Commission rejected that request, just two of the 16 West African countries involved in the negotiations signed EPAs: cote d’Ivoire and Ghana.

“The struggle is never lost,” said Rahmatou Keïta, writer and film-maker from Niger, who took part in the Brussels protest. “We have emerged from colonisation and many other things.

“We women carry the economies of Africa on our shoulders,” she told IPS. “We are in the frontline and we would be penalised more and suffer from a more fragile situation than everyone else as a result of the EPAs.”

Malick Ndiaye, lecturer in sociology at the University of Dakar in Senegal said the protest was a constructive gesture. “We have many proposals and projects,” he said. “But who will listen to us and talk to us? The bureaucracies in Europe and Africa have failed. That is the reason we are entering the debate.”

European Union officials nonetheless claimed that an EPA would be advantageous to Senegalese exporters.

During the EPA negotiations, the EU agreed to modify the ‘rules of origin’ with which manufactured goods have to comply to avail of preferential treatment when entering the Union’s markets. Until now, these have been regarded as too cumbersome for poor countries as they often meant that a country could not enjoy preferences for products made in its factories that used ingredients from another country.

ACP textile manufacturers have borne the brunt of these rules as their garments frequently contain some fibres from Asia. Similar problems have been encountered by fish plants in one country which process tuna caught in waters of a separate land.

Under a revamped system, however, preferences should no longer be denied to such goods. “Countries with small garment industries should be able to export more to the EU,” said one official. “This (building up a textiles industry) has been the classical model in parts of south-east Asia for getting onto the first rung of the ladder to industrialisation. Senegal could develop a nascent textiles industry.”

Because the EPA negotiations have taken place with different regional configurations, the follow-on work to them is expected to proceed at different rates this year. So far, the most comprehensive EPA signed was with the Caribbean region. It covers the prising open of the markets for both goods and services.

One of the main goals established by the European Commission for this year’s talks is to agree with a number of southern African countries that they should agree to liberalise at least part of their services industries. A wider liberalisation would then be designed in the next three years, under a timetable favoured by the Commission, which is also pressing for new rules on investment in that region.

South Africa, despite being the main market of interest to Western firms, has rejected the EPA proposals.

Anti-poverty campaigners suspect that the Commission has an agenda of trying to ensure that multinational firms will be able to operate unhindered and without having to give guarantees that their activities improve the welfare of people living in poor countries.

“The Commission is obsessed with these issues (investment and services),” said Oxfam’s Brussels spokesman Alexander Woollcombe. “That may well be part of the reason why it wasn’t able to go further in the 2007 negotiations. The southern African countries have been pretty strong in saying no to the Commission. Why should they change now?”