Impact of EPAs on Regional Integration

(PANA)--Will Africa salvage its integration agenda in the face of the likely inconsistency between regional objectives and the way several African countries have initialled bilateral trade agreements with their European Union (EU) trading partners?

This is the critical question that the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) will put forward to participants of a continental workshop to be held here 8-10 October 2008 on Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between European and African countries.

As a follow-up to the previous meetings on the same issue, held in Mombasa (2005), Cairo (2006), and Nairobi (2007), the workshop will aim to take stock of the results of the negotiations for EPAs in the light of what African countries had hoped to achieve, the ECA said Monday.

For the last six years, African countries have been engaged in two important tracks of trade negotiations, namely the Doha Round of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the EPAs with the EU.

‘Given the broad objective of Africa’s integration, a key challenge remains how the EPAs negotiations can consolidate rather than complicate the regional moves towards the creation of a Common African Market. ‘As things stand, the EPAs negotiations have resulted in interim agreements being initialled by individual or groups of African countries [but] these agreements vary across the countries and groupings,’ the ECA said.

In addition, the workshop will be the opportunity for African experts and policymakers to evaluate the effects of EPAs on progress towards the African Economic Community, by discussing issues of coordination and harmonisation as well as reviewing questions of trade facilitation, infrastructure development and product quality in order to identify existing gaps and needs.

Through the African Trade Policy Centre (ATPC) and in collaboration with such institutions as the UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and UN Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), the ECA has been working closely with African countries in the Doha and EPA negotiation processes.

It has suggested technical options on how African countries could deal with the various issues raised in each of the negotiations.

The ECA’s Trade, Finance and Economic Development Division (TFED) and the ATPC are jointly organising the workshop. According to ECA officials, the meeting will produce a template for assisting the African Union member countries in their negotiations for the EPAs. The conference of AU trade and finance ministers in April 2008 requested production of the template.

In line with ATPC’s objective of supporting common African positions, the workshop is expected to facilitate consensus building by coming up with proposals on how likely inconsistency from the interim EPAs could be overcome without compromising the objective of attaining an African common market for basic food products.

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