At the invitation of Dr Carlos Lopes of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa—UNECA—I was able to attend its conference in Addis Ababa for AU Finance Ministers, representing the Association of European Parliamentarians with Africa as their UK director.
The EC has negotiated EPAs with five sub-regions in Africa after the concept of the reciprocal trade agreements established in the Cotonou agreement of 2000. These were to cover trade in goods and services, and rules on investment, competition and procurement. But in spite of the high ambitions of these policies, in the course of establishing the EPAs some negotiators claim that a number of concerns have arisen.
Those concerns include the fact that the removal of trade barriers on manufactured goods from the EU could lead to deindustrialisation, contravening policy coherence development policies. If EU agro-food exporters were able to flood growing African markets, undercutting and squeezing out local farmers and their suppliers, this could undermine African agriculture.
These are the very things that we are trying to stop happening. With EU and African states at very different stages of development, reciprocity may not work. This is compounded by increasingly important non-tariff barriers to African exports to the EU and the growing insistence by the EC that African Governments abandon non-tariff policy tools, which are routinely used to support agro-food development programmes.
Against this background, the visit to Addis Ababa was arranged to attend the Finance Ministers’ meeting in April. The objective was to hold consultations with Finance Ministries likely to play a central role in negotiations with the EU over the implementation of concluded EPAs and the reciprocal EPA agreements; in particular, with regard to the use of agro-food sector trade policy tools and how the EC seeks to interpret and apply contentious EPA provisions.
Five bilateral meetings with Finance Ministers from three EPA regions were arranged over two days. With a focus on the Southern African Development Community member states, meetings were held with Ministers from Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland. Other meetings were held with Ministers from Ghana and Uganda.
The key outcomes were as follows. There was a new EC deadline for ratification and entry into force of the Southern African Development Community group EPA. Apparently, this did not allow sufficient time for the Namibian Parliament to go through its examination and approval cycle. The arbitrarily established deadline left a stark choice of either curtailing this process or missing the deadline and facing suspension of Namibia’s trade tariff preferences, with serious effects on beef, grape and fisheries product exports to the EU.
This was not what was intended. The Swaziland Minister for Economic Planning told a similar story, and there were other examples by other delegations from the regions of how difficult it was becoming to work through the EPA process with the EU.
We really do have to look at this. Whatever the reality, the UK, with its close, historic and frequently Commonwealth connections with so many African countries, should be taking the lead in the EU for maintaining the balance between developing their economies and opening markets to the EU.
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