Economic Partnership Agreements

By Alex Singleton | 27 June 2005

Some NGOs are extremely critical of the European Union's Economic Partnership Agreements being negotiated at the moment. They say they will make Africa worse off, forcing them to liberalize their economies for the benefit of Europeans.

I am not really convinced of the merit of EPAs. There might be more progress if the EU approached the issues in a more unilateral way. Nevertheless, reality and what the NGOs are saying are somewhat different.

Peter Mandelson, the European Commissioner for Trade, set out in January how he thought the EPAs should be structured. He said that the emphasis needs to be on capacity building in developing countries and building up south-south trade before liberalization with the European Union. Moreover, he said: "...they should be about progressive trade opening. And there is a deliberate double meaning in my use of 'progressive'. The trade opening or "market access" part of these agreements is not at their forefront: it comes towards at the end, after regional integration has kick-started growth, after long transition periods, after Europe has invested aid and support in these least developing countries' capacity to trade. The transition periods for market opening will be as long as required, based on the actual needs identified in the negotiations. This is not something that needs to be defined in advance and in a vacuum. There is no fixed timetable for liberalisation - only a flexible timetable that depends on each region's progress, sector by sector. This timetable is something to be defined in partnership with the ACP regions themselves, taking account of their specificities, their development progress, and their respective economic structures."