EAC Under Fire

Allan Odhiambo (Business Daily)-The East African Community is fighting a rare battle against ‘political seclusion’ just weeks after it signed a new trade deal with the European Union in a bid to beat an end-of-year World Trade Organisation deadline.

The region’s latest debacle began last month moments after it inked an Interim Framework Agreement with the EU in Kampala, Uganda, amid protest from several African countries who viewed the development as part of a wider scheme by rich nations to stagnate integration in the continent through strategies akin to divide-and-rule.

Last week, critics of the interim trade pacts once again took their complaints before an ambitious EU-Africa Summit in Lisbon where they maintained that the selective signing of trade deals would weaken the efforts of ensuring African unity.

The President of the African Union Commission Alpha Oumar Konare criticised the handful of interim trade deals signed by among others the EAC with the EU.

"Our dearest hope is that the interim accords don’t tie down the rest (of the countries) and complicate things afterwards," he said. "If we build our partnership on the weakness of unity in Africa we’ll have problems" he was quoted as having said.

Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade and his South African counterpart Thabo Mbeki too voiced concern over the future of the fragile African industry and said they would reject Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) with the EU.

Analysts said the stand by the leaders had by extension placed ‘traitor labels’ on the EAC and other nations that have gone ahead to ink interim deals - resulting into fears that they could be treated in seclusion by other African countries.

But hard-pressed by the "traitor tag’ the EAC has now come out fighting and said the move to sign the interim pact was driven by a quest to avoid disruption of trade between the two blocs.

"It is important to understand the rationale and singular motive behind the Interim Framework Agreement, namely to protect the interests of the EAC region in the trade arrangements with the EU.

Whereas the duty and quota free access to EU markets under the Cotonou Agreement lapse on December 31 2007 pursuant to WTO rules, the purpose of the Interim Framework Agreement is precisely to avoid trade disruption over exports of the EAC Partner States to the EU.

Without the interim agreement, EAC exports would have ended quotas and attracted high duties making the exports uncompetitive," a statement from the EAC Directorate for Corporate and Public Affairs read in part.

For starters, the interim agreements have come as a result of Europe trying to change its 25-year preferential trade arrangement with about 80 countries in Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) bloc to be compatible with WTO rules before the current waiver expires on December 31.

The EU envisages to replace expiring trade accords with EPA or temporary deals, which critics warned that may offer little safeguards for Africa’s poor agriculture sector and its related industries.

The regional bloc, however, argued: "The question as to who benefits more from the interim agreement, one or the other EAC partner States, does not arise. The interim agreement has been signed with the express intention to protect all EAC exports, now and into the next decade and beyond.

The EAC partner States, more or less export the same commodities whose preferential access to the EU markets has been safeguarded under the interim agreement,"

The EAC secretariat said though it and other Regional Economic Communities (RECs) have opted for the interim agreement, they would not to be stampeded into signing comprehensive EPAs at this stage because the EAC and the other ACP RECs are collectively not happy with the conditions involved, especially competition, trade in services and investments among others.

"Indeed, most of these issues, upon which the protection of the peasants and farmers of the EAC and ACP countries, the protection of the infant industries of the developing countries and the protection of jobs depend, are work in progress in the Doha Trade and Development Round.

The position that the EAC and other RECs of the ACP countries have taken is that these issues cannot appropriately be negotiated under the EPAs without the completion of the Doha Talks," the EAC stated.

And in a further attempt to shift the spotlight from its door-step, the EAC further claimed that it was not the only region that had initialised the trade deals as largely perceived by many leaders in the continent. So far, the EU has initialised interim deals with more than a dozen nations including the five-member EAC bloc.

But several economic powerhouses in Africa represented under the Economic Community for West African States (Ecowas) have, however, remained adamant and requested for more time to study the implications of the deals.

Most of the nations that have initialised the interim deals have been accused of rushing through the process in a manner that is likely to jeopardise the future of their citizenry, an issue the EAC denies.

"We would state emphatically that the governments of the EAC Partner States have neither taken weak negotiating positions nor given away any interests of the EAC to EU.

Far from it, the next negotiations for a comprehensive EPA, over two years, with effect from January, 2008, for which the EAC has extracted EU concession, will involve a broad multi-stakeholder constituency to ensure that what is negotiated with the EU meets the interests of the East African people as indeed those of the rest of the ACP countries," the bloc maintained.

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