`Stop EPA (fin) read by ho
Story: Boahene Asamoah & Ras Liberty Amewode
SOME Civil Society groups across the African Continent have reiterated their calls on their governments not to sign the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the European Union (EU).
According to them, the signing of the agreement would mortgage the future of Africans to the Europeans.
Regional blocs made up of countries in the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Countries, such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), the Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA) and the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) and their EU counterparts are supposed to sign the EPAs by December this year.
In an interview after the opening of a three-day Africa-wide Civil Society meeting on EPAs in Accra yesterday, Mrs Aulline H. Mabika from Zimbabwe, said “the signing of the EPAs would mortgage the future of our generations.”
Civil Society groups from about 15 African countries and Europe are attending the meeting, which is to strategise the final lapse of the campaign to “Stop EPAs”.
Mrs Mabika said there was the need for a comprehensive trade agreement that would involve all stakeholders and respect the needs of Africans, saying the EPAs as they stood neither were consultative enough nor had strong development agenda for African countries.
“The issues of social services, poverty eradication and health are not properly addressed,” she stated.
Mrs Mabika stated that all the regions in Africa were not adequately prepared for the EPAs as the continent lacked the capacity to address the issues inherent in the trade agreement.
She said for Zimbabwe the issues were critical as the country was being made to sign the agreement under ESA instead of SADEC.
Mrs Mabika stated that the country would then have to determine under which customs treaty it would operate if the country went ahead to sign the agreements under ESA.
She said what continent needed was strong negotiators and ensuring that the process towards the signing of the agreement involved the ordinary people of Africa.
For his part, the Head of Programmes of Third World Network, Mr Tetteh Hormeku, said the signing of the agreement would spell doom for most African countries.
He said at the moment some countries were requesting for draft agreements, excuses he said were a confirmation that the various blocs were not ready for the agreements.
Mr Hormeku said persuading their various governments not to sign the EPAs was as much a challenge as getting the people who would directly bear the brunt of the agreement to be active players in the attempt to stop the EPAs.
The Co-ordinator of the Third World Network, Dr Yao Graham, said the meeting would afford participants to draw up strategies to ensure that they intensified their activities as the time drew closer.
Dr Graham called for the active involvement of the media to ensure that the objectives of stopping the EPAs was achieved.
African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries are negotiating for EPAs which are aimed at defining the future trade and economic relations between the EU and regional blocs such as ECOWAS and ESA, when the Cotonou Agreement expires in 2007.
The Cotonou Agreement was signed in June 2000 to replace the various Lome Conventions, through which the ACP countries accessed EU markets for almost three decades tariff and quota-free.
Negotiations on the EPAs started in September 2002 and are supposed to be concluded by the end of this year.
The need for the EPAs came in the wake of complaints from non-ACP countries in 1994 that the preferential and non-reciprocal trade that existed between ACP and EU countries was not in accordance with the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, which the WTO agreed with, saying the ACP countries will have unfair advantage.
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