Positive development

At the start of this year the EU’s partnership with thecountries of the African, Caribbean andPacific regions turned an important corner. The trade chapters of the CotonouAgreement, which set the framework for our trade relationship for thirty years,have expired. We are replacing them with new economic partnership agreementsthat set out to do what Cotonouwas never able to do: to help ACP economies diversify away from basic commoditytrade.  To help them build strongereconomies based on regional markets and integration into the globaleconomy. 

The EPAs also end a decades-long anomaly in our tradedevelopment policy: the fact that we offered very generous trade preferences toone set of developing countries to whom the EU has historical links, and not toothers. This situation was understandably resented, and was subject to legalchallenge by other developing countries. This system also offered better market access to some than others. Byextending the same terms – no tariffs, no quotas – to all, the EPAs will helpACP countries integrate their own economies on a regional basis.  They will open ACP markets gradually in orderto give them time to adapt.  We have notpursued any commercial EU interest in these negotiations but sought the minimumliberalisation necessary for the EPAs to be safe from challenge in theWTO.  It is worth noting, though, thatmany ACP countries chose to open their markets more than the minimum becausethey judged it to be in their interest to do so.

But we have not yet unlocked the development potential ofthese agreements.  We still have totransform a series of interim agreements into full regional EPAs of the kindagreed with the Caribbean. We are already discussinghow to do this in the African and Pacific contexts, how to build up basic goodstrade agreements into full regional agreements that help attract new investmentand develop the services sectors that drove economic development in Asia.  Suchmeasures, together with rules of good economic governance, are not in my viewoptional extras but development basics.

Many African economies today have a unique chance to use thecommodity boom and the rise of new economies to drive growth anddevelopment.  Whether they seize thatopportunity will depend on using their new income productively, opening theireconomies carefully and intelligently to new trade and new investment.  This is precisely what the full EPAs, withtheir unlimited access to the EU market, graduated opening in ACP economies,new measures on investment and good economic governance and targeteddevelopment assistance, can help to support.

Nobody would deny that the EPA process has been challenging.It is the first time that the poorest developing countries have sat down withan economy the size of the EU to negotiate such broad-ranging and ambitiousagreements.

Some continue wrongly to believe that ACP countries arenegotiating under pressure from the EU. That is not my experience across thetable from the dedicated negotiators and reformers of the ACP who know theirinterests and believe that EPAs will serve them well.  It is worth remembering; of the 18 Africancountries that initialled agreements last year, 10 were least developedcountries who didn’t need an EPA to access EU markets because they alreadyenjoy free access under the everything but arms scheme.  They joined for development reasons and tohelp create new vibrant regional economies. That is a world first. It is why Iam committed to making these agreements a success.

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