Signing EPA will be suicidal - CSOs
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Myjoyonline | August 26, 2011
Signing EPA will be suicidal - CSOs
From: Malik Abass Daabu
Ghana — A number of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in the country have painted a bleak picture about the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), warning the government will be consigning the economy to irretrievable doom, if it signs the pact.
The CSOs say the government must not allow itself to be pressured into signing an agreement which will be detrimental to long-term development goals and aspirations of the country.
At a forum organized by the Third World Network – Africa, the General Agricultural Workers Union (GAWU), and ISODEC in Accra, there was unanimity that ratifying the agreement will amount to committing economic crimes against the state.
Speaking at the Forum, Dr David Persey, a consultant to the Ghana National Association of Poultry Farmers, said the government must declare its stance – whether it is with the people of Ghana or the Europeans.
For him, the EPA was designed to further the interest of Europe and that there was no basis for the government of Ghana to even be contemplating signing it.
Citing the poultry industry, he said, Ghana used to produce enough to meet domestic needs with its concomitant effects on jobs and wealth creation.
However, since the day the government repealed its own law in 2003 originally intended to protect the industry, and allowed unlimited importation of poultry products, the investments of citizens who toiled to build structures for the production and processing of poultry have gone under the drain because cheap products have flooded the market.
Supporting his argument, the Executive Director of the Abantu for Development, Dr Rose Mensah-Kutin, who chaired the forum, said Ghana was having a crisis on its hands.
She said if even now, Ghana’s streets were swarming with teeming jobless young men and women, all Ghanaians must be worried because the situation could get worse if the EPAs are signed and the economy takes a turn for the worse.
Government’s reaction
Responding to the submissions, Dr John Asiedu, a representative of the Trade Minister, said if Ghana had not initialed the Interim EPA when it did in 2007, companies such as Blue Skies would have folded up because Europe would have imposed tariffs on their exports.
That he said would have resulted in loss of jobs.
According to him, the biggest challenge the country’s economy faces today is not Europe but Asia especially, China which he said was flooding the Ghanaian market with cheap exports, thereby undermining local manufacturing companies.
That point was seized upon by an officer at the Political Economy Unit of the Third World Network, Mr Gyekye Tanoh, who said that precisely is the reason the EPAs should not be signed.
He said the argument that some companies would suffer if the IEPA had not been signed was not a very sustainable argument. What is important he insisted, is that the cost of the tariffs that would be imposed on the few products exported to Europe must be juxtaposed with the cost to the country’s economy if it is opened ajar to Europe.
While the government, he said, thought it prudent to establish the Export Development and Investment Fund (EDIF) with objective to “enhance the economic growth of Ghana by the provision of funds on concessionary terms for the development and promotion of the country’s export,” the EPA would make that illegal.
He said it was extremely dangerous to open the market up simply because we want to protect a few agricultural products.
