Uncertain future for ‘diabolic’ free trade pacts between EU and Africa
In the run-up to the fifth Eu-africa summit in Côte d’ivoire, the future of the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAS) between Europe and its former colonies looks bleaker than ever. While most of Europe’s trade partners around the world keep refusing to sign the deals, the African Union’s Commissioner for Trade will most likely announce a moratorium on all EPAS.
Ever since independence, Europe’s former colonies have enjoyed preferential (duty-free) access to the European market. In turn they didn’t need to open their own markets. When in 2000 the World Trade Organization deemed this one-sided market opening unlawful, Europe and 79 countries in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) started negotiating reciprocal trade deals, according to IPS.
The resulting deals, coined Economic Partnership Agreements or EPAS, are not pure free trade deals. Under the agreements, ACP countries are allowed to keep protecting 20 percent of their products — mostly agricultural products — with import tariffs. The other 80 percent will be liberalized gradually over the course of 20 years after the signing and ratification of the deal. The deals were negotiated between the European Commission and seven regions of several countries engaged in economic integration processes.
Stalling the implementation
Seventeen years later only two of the seven negotiated deals have been signed, ratified and implemented, one with the South African Development Community (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland) and one with the Caribbean. The EPA with West Africa is currently blocked by Nigeria, Gambia and Mauritania who refuse to sign, while in the East African region, last year Tanzania sued Kenya for signing while Uganda wants to address more concerns — President Museveni traveled to Brussels on a three-day work visit at the end of September for talks.
Almost all ACP countries fear the possible negative impact of the EPAS on their economies and therefore stall its implementation.
“They already had the right to export to Europe duty-free,” said Joyce Naar, a lawyer and activist with the ACP Civil Society Forum.
“Now they are expected to open up their markets to Europe without getting anything back.”
Especially in Africa, governments and analysts fear an encore of the tomato and chicken scenario. In Ghana, for instance, after IMF and World Bankenforced tariff reductions, import surges caused the market share for domestic chicken to fall from 100 percent to a mere three percent today in less than three decades. The chicken industry, once the second largest employer in the country, has now been taken over by competing imports from Canada, Brazil, Europe and China.
As for tomatoes, after lowering tariffs Ghana became the second largest importer of tomatoes in the world and according to FAO data, market share for domestic produce dwindled from 92 to 57 percent in only five years.
Industrialization at risk
Aside from agricultural produce, NGOS also fear that entire industrialization of the continent is at risk.
At a recent international trade union conference on the issue of EPAS in Togo, this point was repeatedly made. “To industrialize, we need to protect and develop the internal market until we’re ready for international competition, as has been demonstrated by China,” said Georgios Altintzis of the International Trade Union Confederation (ETUC).
At the conference, Mariama Williams, senior program officer at the South Center in Geneva, also stressed that increased competition would lead to increasing feminization of work.
“Women do the worst jobs in the worst conditions,” she stated at the conference.
According to Williams, EPAS will have the greatest impact on labor-intensive industries where women are disproportionately employed. An increase of competition would raise the pressure on these sectors while the internal standards and labor conditions remain unchanged.