Story: Boahene Asamoah and Lucy Adoma Yeboah
THE outgoing Minister of Trade, Industry, Private Sector Development and President’s Special Initiatives (PSIs), Mr Alan Kyerematen, has said that the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries and the European Union (EU) should be flexible and take on board sensitive sectors of the economy of West African countries.
“The negotiations on the EPAs should be flexible, taking into consideration sensitive areas, such as fiscal policies and market access, of member countries of ECOWAS,” he said.
Mr Kyerematen said this at the ministerial session on the EPAs negotiations between West Africa and the EU Ministerial Monitoring Committee meeting in Accra yesterday.
The outgoing minister said there must also be a flexible transition period and stated that given the time frame and the need to finalise key policies, it was unlikely that agreements could be implemented in January 2008, even if they were signed in December this year.
Mr Kyerematen called for interim measures to be considered in the event that all the negotiations were met before the December 2007 deadline and acknowledged that issues such as market access and the impact of the EPAs on customs were some of the challenges facing the agreements.
He said a major challenge was the lack of capacity of West African states to supply requirements of their products and urged the EU to implement all capacity-building commitments undertaken under the Cotonou Agreement.
The minister said there was the need to build the export competitiveness of products from the sub-region, since that was “indispensable” to the EPAs and to ensure the competitiveness of African products.
The President of the ECOWAS Commission, Dr Mohammed Ibn Chambas, said the EPAs “should not only be trade agreements but also have development dimensions”.
He said “the sum of €334 million pledged by our development partners to underpin the EPAs in the region is far below our expectations and clearly inadequate to kick-start the development of the West African economy, build our productive capacity and mitigate budgetary losses”.
The EPAs are a trade document expected to be signed by the EU and ACP countries, which include countries in the West African sub-region.
The EPAs, which are expected to be signed by December this year, have attracted criticism from civil society groups whose main concerns are access to European markets and the uncompetitiveness of products from the sub-region.
Meanwhile African countries have been charged to take advantage of the AGOA since the dispensation will not be forever.
Mr Kyerematen, gave the advice at the First Experts’ Meeting of the African Ministerial Consultative Group on AGOA in Accra yesterday.
“Let us remember that AGOA will not remain open to Africa for ever. So let us take advantage of it to transform our economies and build up our competitiveness for the present and the future,” he stressed.
Addressing participants from AGOA eligible sub-Saharan African countries, he said it was unfortunate for African countries to waste the opportunity to export any of the 6,400 products duty free and quota-free to the largest consumer market in the world, worth trillions of dollars.
The Experts’ Meeting of the African Ministerial Consultative Group is part of the 6th AGOA Forum taking place in Accra between July 16 and 19, 2007, on the theme: “Trade Grows, Africa Prospers: Optimising the Benefits Under AGOA”.
The theme for the Accra forum is to reflect on how to encourage countries to diversify their exports by taking advantage of the broad range of products eligible for preferential treatment under the act.
Mr Kyerematen said in spite of the obvious benefits to be gained by African countries from that landmark initiative, the progress made in several countries was regrettably slow, and therefore the impact on most economies insignificant.
He explained that the problem was partly due to the lack of capacity to organise production on a competitive basis to take advantage of the huge market potential in the United States.
“Many countries are yet to identify the comparative or competitive advantage that they have within the diversified product range under AGOA,” he observed.
He also blamed the shortfall on the lack of strategic focus on the kind of policy, legal, institutional and support framework that would assist the private sector to produce items which would be accepted at the international market.
Mr Kyerematen reiterated that there was the need for African countries to strive to produce a variety of products on a mass scale for export in order to create jobs, earn foreign exchange, thereby increasing the level of income, particularly for the disadvantaged and the vulnerable.
“Most of our countries have depended almost exclusively on one or two major export commodities as our economic backbone for the past five to 10 decades,” he said, adding that such countries also failed to add value to their products to enable them earn higher.
This year’s forum, unlike previous ones, has been structured as an integrated event with joint or concurrent participation by the United States and African government officials as well as private sector and civil society representatives.
An exhibition has been mounted alongside the forum at the Accra International Conference Centre (AICC) to enable some selected exhibitors to showcase their locally made products under AGOA.
Items on display are mainly garments, beverages, beads, ornaments, herbal medicines and leather wares.
No comments:
Post a Comment