Trade row casts shadow over EU-Africa summit
Agence France Presse | 6 December 2007
Trade row casts shadow over EU-Africa summit
A row over new trade rules risks souring the mood at this weekend’s EU-Africa summit and underlines the problems Europe faces in forging new relations with its former colonies, according to analysts.
"This is the great fear for the Europeans. That’s why they are trying to hold this kind of discussion as much as possible away from the summit," said San Bilal of the European Centre for Development Policy Management.
However the European leaders will have a tough job preventing the most opposed among their African counterparts from placing the subject on the summit table in Lisbon on Saturday and Sunday.
The Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA), designed to replace Europe’s preferential trade system towards African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) nations, are based on progressive market opening.
The new agreements would require the 78 ACP countries to gradually open their markets to European goods in exchange for open access to European markets from January 1, 2008, with the exception of rice and sugar.
The existing trade agreements giving preferential market access to the former colonies have to be replaced by the end of the year because the World Trade Organisation (WTO) has ruled that they were illegal.
However the fear among some of the poorest nations on the planet is of a flood of less expensive European goods.
South Africa said Wednesday it would not sign a new trade pact with the EU until its concerns over possible "detrimental impacts" are addressed.
Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said last week that his country and others similarly would not sign the new trade deal.
"I say that Senegal will not sign these accords," Wade said, noting that they had also been rejected by the regional group of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).
Wade’s spokesman said the Senegalese leader would himself bring the question of EPAs up at the summit "If others don’t."
"He will do all he can to ensure that other African countries don’t sign up either," the spokesman added.
"Ironically, the theme of the summit is partnership but what we have seen in these trade negotiations is far from partnership, it has been imposition," complains Emily Jones of Oxfam.
Despite the end-of-the-year deadline, only 14 countries — including 12 African nations — have so far concluded an accord.
The European Commission is therefore giving up on agreements covering goods and services to concentrate solely on goods.
However EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson last week acknowledged that some regions in the ACP might not be ready to sign full deals or even framework agreements by the end of the year deadline.
The Commission wants to avoid the need to impose tariffs on goods from Africa, Caribbean and Pacific nations if there is no agreement by December 31, raising fears of widespread losses and a collapse of local sectors.
Some African officials accuse Brussels of adopting a divide and rule policy, by signing the EPA deals country by country, thereby further undermining the continent’s already elusive regional solidarity.
Such integration is one of the objectives of a new strategic partnership between the two continents which is to be adopted at the summit, Bilal said.
The EU’s executive arm rejects all such criticism, assuring that it has only good intentions.
Mandelson, not invited to the summit, sees the new trade deal as "a historic step forward in the relationship between the EU and southern Africa" and says it has become the object of an ill-informed campaign by lobby groups.
