EALA heeds Mkapa’s call on Epa agreement
The Citizen | Monday, 04 October 2010
EALA heeds Mkapa’s call on Epa agreement
By Al-amani Mutarubukwa, Citizen Reporter
Dar es Salaam. Partner states of the East African Community (EAC) should not rush to seal partnership deals with the European Union until sticky issues are sorted out, the East African Legislative Assembly (Eala) has cautioned.
According to Dr Deodorus Kamala, minister for East African Cooperation, the Eala session ended last week in Kigali, Rwanda, has resolved that the EAC council of ministers should continue negotiations while seeking to convince the EU to rectify outstanding clauses in the proposed Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA).
“The Eala agrees with us on delaying the signing of the EPA framework with a view to urging the European Union to work with EAC partner states in reviewing the framework to include interests of both parties,” said Dr Kamala at news briefing here on Saturday.
He added: “The Legislators want us to delay signing the pacts because of the three main reasons: first is the most favoured nation clause, which if we sign, will make us liable to offer the EU any trade advantages that we shall give to any other country. The clause is wrong as it prohibits us from making new friends.”
Members of the Assembly also want the clause limiting the East African countries to levy export taxes before approval by EU to be removed, as it will oblige the block to remain the raw material-exporter forever.
In addition, they want the EU to include the clause that legally obliges its member states to provide the EAC bloc with development and economic support, said the minister.
Among clauses holding back consensus, Dr Kamala mentioned those on development assistance, the most favoured nation and limiting the East African countries to levy export taxes before approval by EU.
The most favoured nation status is granted to one country by another and offers the beneficiary trading advantages such as low tariffs that others countries do not enjoy.
“It has been observed that such clauses may lock us into a single commercial relationship without room to diversify our target markets to other economic blocs such as the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) or the Southern African Development Community (SADC)” Dr Kamala clarified.
The EAC wants the EU to fund the region’s infrastructure development so that it can have reliable energy supply, railway lines and road networks that would put the East African region at par with the EU when the EPAs become legally binding.
Concerns, however, have been raised over likely negative effects of such pacts with some critics claiming that the EPAs could erode the competitiveness of the African continent.
Former President Benjamin Mkapa is in record to have warned the East Africa bloc to be wary of EPA, saying it was another European form of colonising the continent.
Speaking in Nairobi at the Pan-African Media Conference early this year, Mr Mkapa warned the EAC partner states - Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi - that EPA could turn out to be another “scramble for Africa” that would only weaken the regional economic bloc.
Mr Mkapa told the conference, which was part of the 50th anniversary celebration of the Nation Media Group (NMG), that if lured into the EPA, the EAC should not expect to make any economic progress “because there is no fair trade between the developed and developing states.”
But, reacting to Mr Mkapa’s warning, the European Commission told this paper that EPA is concerned with promoting the regional integration process, and notably supporting measures taken by regional groupings themselves to open up trade with their neighbours and the wider international community.
While Eala has supported the move to delay the signing of EPA, the EU Head of Delegation to Tanzania, Mr Tim Clarke, is on record to have warned that the delay in signing the Framework Economic Partnership Agreements (FEPA) would undermine trade relations between the two blocs.
Initialled in November 2007, FEPA with the European Commission was expected to be concluded on July 31, 2009 but the signing was postponed.
The second attempt to sign the FEPAs in June this year stumbled on another deadlock as the EAC council of ministers could not agree with terms of the pacts.
But Mr Clarke, in his hard-hitting statement, cautioned that more than two years after initialling the Framework EPA with the EU, the latter was disappointed by the EAC’s failure to sign the agreement.
“It is now time to follow through with the clear, forward-looking agreement of 2007, when negotiations on the Framework EPA were concluded and turn this new trade and development partnership into a reality,” he said.
