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Contributions from
the Column
InWEnt Forum
ACP countries: „We know what we want“
EPA negotations: outcome uncertain
Maghreb: New challenges for refuse collectors
06/2006 |
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EPA negotiations: outcome uncertain
Banny Molosiwa sums up a key reservation of the ACP countries: “The European Union wants to talk to us about investment and competition rules although we have no position on these issues at all.” The secretary of state at Botswana’s ministry of trade is the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC) coordinator for negotiations with the EU on the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs). The agreements will define the trade regime between Europe and the ACP countries (Africa, Caribbean, Pacific) as of 2008.
EPA critics in civil society, too, accuse the EU of using the EPAs to put the so-called Singapore issues – investment, competition, trade facilitation and public procurement – back on the trade policy agenda. In the World Trade Organisation, the developing countries successfully resisted such moves and managed to get the issues dropped from the Doha Round. Klaus Schilder of the German civil society organisation WEED comments: “We have nothing whatsoever against investment rules. It just strikes us as suspicious that the EU insists on incorporating them into interregional EPAs.” Molosiwa and Schilder spoke at an International Policy Dialogue on the EPAs staged by the InWEnt Development Policy Forum and the German Development Ministry at the end of April in Berlin.
The event showed that major differences still exist between the negotiating parties – and that they also sometimes fail to really communicate. Karl Friedrich Falkenberg, Deputy Director for Trade at the European Commission, says it is necessary to talk about investment rules because investment is a prerequisite for development. “No one has explained to me yet how jobs are supposed to be created without someone putting up money.” Sure enough, many ACP representatives would perfectly agree. Paul Kalenga, for example, Senior Trade Adviser at the SADC Secretariat in Gabarone, Botswana, says that rules for investment and services are essential to alleviate supply-side constraints in many ACP countries. However, as Kalenga puts it: “We want to define those rules ourselves and not have them dictated by the European Umion.”
The conference offered an interesting insight into the negotiating positions and tactics of the ACP regions and thus broadened the EPA debate, which in Europe is largely marked by the clash between civil society and the EU Commission. At times, some ACP countries seemed to be decidedly uncertain about what they have actually let themselves in for in engaging with the EU in the negotiations. “The EPAs are unstoppable and we don’t know what the future holds,” said one former African trade minister in a helpless tone. Junior Lodge, on the other hand, the eloquent negotiation coordinator of the Caribbean countries, emphatically rejects any suggestion that the ACP countries do not know what they are doing (see interview).
Germany’s Development Minister Heidemarie Wieczorek-Zeul assured the ACP representatives she would work to ensure that the EPAs were designed as not just trade but also development instruments. In the minister’s words, the agreements “must not be seen just as contracts but as a process that can be adapted to the ACP countries’ diverse and changing needs.” (ell)
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