EU renews interest in stalled trade deal
NAIROBI - The European Union (EU) is looking to revive the stalled multilateral trade talks between the 28-member economic bloc and the East African Community (EAC).
This comes in the wake of renewed investor interest in Kenya, with the United Kingdom and the United States, keen to establish a trade deal to serve as a gateway to the region.
The European Council president Charles Michel on Tuesday met President Uhuru Kenyatta at State House Nairobi, where he expressed the EU’s willingness to conclude trade talks that are in progress between the two regions.
“Our goal is to strengthen the cooperation between the EU and Kenya. I have proposed a strategic dialogue with Kenya on several topics on the economic agenda and the regional situation,” he said.
“The president is committed to ensuring the economic integration will increase and improve in the future and we want to ensure Kenya and the regional countries have more access to the single EU market.”
The EAC and EU finalised a draft Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the two regions in 2014 after more than a decade of negotiations. However, only Kenya ratified the document by the October 2016 deadline set by the EU. The document has remained in limbo since then.
At the centre of the contention between Member States was the fact that Kenya was classified as a developing economy after rebasing its growth figures in 2014 with the rest classified as least developed nations (LDCs).
“As LDCs, the rest of the countries had no rush to ratify the document because their goods can still access the EU market duty-free under the everything but arms protocol,” explained Moses Ikiara, the head of KenInvest and former chief executive of a think-tank, Kenya Institute of Public Policy and Research Analysis.
– THE STANDARD, Kenya.