Ohenenana Obonti Krow George Spencer Quaye STATEMENT BY THE AFRICA TRADE NETWORK (ATN) ON BEHALF OF AFRICA, CARIBBEAN AND PACIFIC (ACP) CIVIC ORGANISATIONS ON THE OCCASION OF THE 6TH SUMMIT OF ACP HEADS OF STATE and GOVERNMENT UNITE TO STOP EU RE-COLONISATION- STOP EPAs NOW! The 6th Summit of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States from September 30-October 3, 2008 in Accra, Ghana takes place at a time when evidence is mounting, right across the world, of the destructiveness of pursuing unbridled ‘free market economics’ as the only viable system of organizing and managing economies. ACP governments must draw these fundamental lessons to inform decisions they take to deal with their economic relations and challenges including the triple crises of food, fuel and the global financial meltdown. Soaring prices of fuel and basic food stuffs such as rice, maize and wheat threaten to push hundreds of millions of people in ACP countries further into poverty and starvation. We therefore urge ACP governments to reject the so-called ‘Economic Partnership Agreements’ (EPAs) the European Union is seeking to sign with the various ACP regions as these free trade pacts will worsen the plight of these developing countries. As a result of the growing global fallout from liberalization in financial and commodities’ trade, ACP economies do indeed face extreme economic challenges in the coming years. In effect, this is the worst time for the ACP group of countries to institutionalize free trade regimes even more deeply and fundamentally than they have already taken root with the European Union (EU). ACP states are among countries in the global South whose productive agricultural sectors have been greatly weakened by hasty and excessive trade liberalization that has allowed cheap and illegally subsidized imports, often from Europe, to wipe out domestic production even in ACP local markets. As a result, most ACP economies have transitioned from relative food self-sufficiency to food import dependency in a period. Such economies will have no protection whatsoever from the imported inflation – through food imports – which is already wrecking, and will continue to wreck lives and livelihoods in the ACP regions, which are amongst the poorest in the world. EPAs will increase this vulnerability. Such imports will also undermine what remains of local production even further. EPAs will make this situation permanent. In addition to the devastation of inflation is the threat of looming global recession. The slowdown of economies is spreading from the main Western economies. Major European economies, the most important single destination of ACP exports, are facing severe economic downturn. As the British government now openly admits, it is faced with its worst economic crisis in 60 years. This downturn will inevitably lead to a fall in the demand for ACP exports. In effect, market failure and inflation threaten to wipe out the fragile relative growth that some ACP primary commodity exporters have experienced in the last few years, while intensifying the competition they face. Already, ACP share of trade, globally (and in the EU) has fallen relative to other competitors. As a September 2008 UN report on Africa’s performance under trade liberalization shows – Africa’s export market share has dropped from six (6) per cent to three (3) per cent of world trade since the 1980s; the self-same period that trade liberalization, structural adjustment and related economic policy regimes were ruthlessly installed in ACP countries by the major powers and international financial institutions (IFIs) such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The ‘free trade’ EPAs will extend this ‘policy dictatorship’ and entrench the disastrous trade performance of ACP countries. Making the protection of marginal preferences for ACP exports into EU markets cannot be the cornerstone of our trade and economic policy. But it is this that is supposed to constitute the ACPs greatest trade gain in the EPAs! As the whole world knows, these ‘preferences’ are being eroded inexorably. Making these preferences an inviolate central strategy contributed to ACP economies’ failure to industrialise and diversify their economies beyond the paralyzing dependence on primary commodity exports, since the beginning of the ACP-Europe regime in the 1970s. Of course Europe’s draconian ‘tariff escalation’ on processed value-added ACP products all but assured this. EPAs offer no means and no alternative to address the systemic causes of ACP marginalization in world trade and the global economy. Only last week in Brussels, trade delegations from the Pacific region warned that bowing to EU’s insistence that Pacific Island (and other ACP) countries abolish protection of infant industries within 20 years will remove “our space to give time for our infant industries to mature before entering what is going to be a very competitive global trading environment [and] will retard industrial development in our countries. Giving up this right forever will be the highest price we will pay and we just simply cannot afford that”. The word “forever” is like eternal damnation. There is no ‘sunset’ (no time limit) on the duration of the full EPAs once they are signed, EPAs will prevent and paralyze the development, industrialization and diversification of ACP economies forever. Aid will also dry up as the advanced economies bail out and re-nationalize their troubled financial sectors from the excesses of liberalization. But to ACP Countries, the costs of adjusting to and implementing further and unprecedented liberalization through EPAs will be enormous. Yet, the EU insists ACP countries make up these draconian but entirely avoidable costs by reforms that impose further suffering on their impoverished populations – including tax reforms that target the informal sector and indirect taxes (like VAT and charges for public services like health and education) that hit hardest the consumption of goods and services by working people and the poor. In contrast, tariff elimination on EU goods and tax cuts on EU investors who must be given ‘national treatment’ means that some of the biggest multi-billion euro multinational companies are given tax gifts paid for by the ACP poor. EPAs are ‘Special and Differential Treatment’ only for Europe’s benefit. EPAs will worsen poverty and inequality within the ACP and between the ACP and other regions, especially the EU itself. These inhuman and regressive tax reforms are among the ‘conditions’ for EU disbursement of their part of their ‘contribution’ to ‘mitigate’ the cost of adjustment and implementation of EPAs for ACP countries. Together with this, dwindling ACP government revenue from trade and customs duties through the EPAs will also reinforce and intensify ACPs aid dependency. The danger of this increase and abuse of ‘aid conditionality’ by the EU has already been manifest in the EPA negotiation process, as was borne out by the public row that broke out between Pacific and EU officials over the latter’s threat to withhold flows of already-existing ‘aid’ if the Pacific did not accept EU demands in the EPA. EPAs will increase ACP aid dependency and EUs use and abuse of aid conditionality - even as they cut aid flows. The future looks dire indeed. But the damage can be repaired. ACP governments have the responsibility and the authority to take measures to do this. ACP governments must: Re-open and review all ‘EPA agreements’, both interim and comprehensive, that have been initialed. These so-called ‘agreements’ initialed largely in November and December 2007 were nothing more than statements of intent to enable emergency defensive measures at the end of 2007 in response to EU’s threat to disrupt exports from ACP countries into the European market. These ‘agreements’ cannot be legally binding and can be challenged and blocked altogether on the basis of a number of legal instruments such as the Vienna Convention on International Treaties. The EU Parliament’s report on ‘Development Impact of EPAs’ (ref: 2008/2170 (INI)), dated 17th September 2008, recounts how ACP countries “were pushed” into these so-called agreements without options or alternative transitional solutions, which the EU was and is under legal obligation to ensure, such as “extending GSP+ to all ACP countries”. Suspend all negotiations towards free trade agreements on ‘Trade in Services’ with the EU, as the Pacific region has just done. Services must not be part of the EPAs. Reject the inclusion of Trade-Related Issues in the EPAs – i.e. the ‘Singapore Issues’ such as Investment and Government Procurement (public tenders and contracts), which in any case they have already rejected in the WTO but are being imposed on them through the backdoor – EPAs. A special inquiry into the EPAs commissioned by French President Sarkozy (in his capacity as the current EU President), known as ‘the Taubira report’ recommends eliminating Singapore and Trade-related Issues from the EPAs as a vital measure to restore ACP countries’ confidence in the EU, and the credibility of the EPAs. Resolve to negotiate and agree a non-reciprocal ‘goods only’ EPAs with the EU, as the Government of Guyana has put forward. Insist on the removal of punitive tariffs imposed by the EU on exports from ACP countries, such as Nigeria, a country which has so far not completely buckled under EU pressure to sign ‘interim EPAs’. As the EU Parliamentary report of September 17 forcefully states: “neither the conclusion nor the renunciation of an EPA should lead to a situation where an ACP country may find itself in a less favourable position than it was under the trade provisions of the Cotonou Agreement”. The punitive taxes imposed by the EU on the vulnerable Nigerian cocoa sector, already costing millions of dollars in the last few months alone, is against the legally binding provisions of the Cotonou Agreement and the EU’s legal obligations. That the EU is prepared to impose draconian taxes on products from some of the the poorest economies and regions of the world, simply to get its way to secure the monopoly of its commodities, companies and capital over those regions, is unacceptable. The ACP must therefore reject this categorically and demand its removal. Support to countries such as Nigeria against EU trade aggression is vitally to re-build the ACP unity severely weakened by the EPA process. The unity of ACP sub-regions and the ACP as a whole also requires an insistence on the minimum that is acceptable to all – i.e. a non-reciprocal ‘goods only’ trade agreement with the EU. This is the only sure basis for Regional Integration and South-South cooperation for ACP countries. Adopt measures to ensure ACP unity at sub-regional and pan-ACP levels in the EPAs. The coordination and harmonization of ACP positions and of the minimum trade reform measures that prevent disruption of fragile export sectors WHILST satisfying WTO compatibility requires the foundational pillar of unity between ACP LDCs and non-LDCs through their universal access to EBA and GSP+ export regimes. Reject all pressures to short-circuit and side-step democratic and constitutional rules for the ratification and adoption of international treaties by Parliaments of ACP member-states. Parliaments in particular (and other key stakeholders) in ACP countries have been marginalized by the EU-dictated EPA processes. All parliamentary statements and reports from across the ACP and in the EU itself warns against the grave anti-development impact of an all encompassing free trade EPA between for ACP countries, because free trade agreements between countries and economies at diametrically opposed levels of development will have only one winner: the economically powerful. The EU is the world’s largest trading bloc, while ACP regions are amongst the poorest in the world. As Guyana’s President said when he took the case against the EPA and its profound anti-developmental dangers before the UN General Assembly last week: “Even at this late hour, I wish to plead [for the] review [of] these agreements before they irretrievably harm … the ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific states).” As civic organizations from across the ACP, we demand that ACP leaders stand up and measure up to their primary responsibilities to their peoples. There has been no time as now when such leadership has been so needed to affirm the continued relevance and to assure the future of the ACP group. There has scarcely ever been a greater necessity for bold leadership that not only protects our economies while ensuring that unworkable and disastrous orthodoxies, especially that of unbridled free market liberalization and free trade, are reversed. Today the lessons cannot be clearer. Even in the midst of the orgy of greed and chaos engulfing financial markets in the advanced countries, the very heartlands of the powers who insist that ACP and developing countries and regions liberalise and open their economies and subject their peoples’ welfare wide open to the turbulence and destructive market forces, the notion and practice of direct governmental action to regulate, intervene in and to protect thresholds of economic viability is taking hold – as the $700 billion United States government bailout and the nationalizations of banks on both sides of the Atlantic attest. EPAs are putting almost a billion ACP livelihoods - and millions of lives- are at stake and ACP leaders cannot behave like the pupils who dogmatically want to outdo their ‘masters’, long after those masters themselves jettisoned their own diktats. For our part, as civic organizations and activists we will continue in our determination to Stop the EPAs altogether. The growing voices and opposition of women’s organizations, farmers groups, trade unionists, students, NGOs, and diverse range of actors in and beyond the ACP must soar more than ever to Stop the EPAs. The ACP group brings together the largest number of nations in any one grouping, apart from the UN General Assembly. ACP is made up of 79 countries. Its voice, our voice, is the voice of democracy. Today, the Africa Trade Network and the Economic Justice Network of Ghana give expression to that voice and say: Stop the EPAs now. We hope and enjoin all of you to join us to fight for and win this legitimate demand. Get Up, Stand Up! Accra, September 29, 2008. ACP Contact: [email protected] Joyce Kwafo: 0244 643780 Kwasi Obeng: 0272 879 377 1
Posted on: Thu, 27 Mar 2014 11:40:48 +0000
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