“Stop dancing salsa with the livelihood of the people”

A number of civil society organisations participating in the just ended meeting of the West Africa Ministerial Monitoring Committee of the EPA have expressed disappointment with the failure of Ministers to move forward on the clear options available them even as they acknowledged the impossibility of concluding an EPA agreement by December 2007.

At their meeting on 16 July, Ministers admitted that it was not realistic to expect to conclude the negotiations by the original deadline of the end of this year, contrary to the insistence of the EU. They also acknowledged that it was necessary to begin, in advance of the deadline, to identify options which would enable their countries continue their level of trade with the EU in the absence of an EPA agreement.

In their final statement, however, they refrained from putting forward a specfic direction. Instead, they directed their negotiators to “work in a sustained manner and report to them on all the outstanding tasks and options in order that there would be no legal vaccuum in West Africa-EU trade relations.’’

“This is unfortunate, especially since there are clear and feasible options available, such as the GSP+, which some countries even put forward during the meeting,” said Tetteh Hormeku of TWN-Africa, Accra. The West African countries run the risk of not being able to put on the table and in time, the clear and realistic options available outside the EPAs. They therefore leave themselves even more vulnerable to EU pressure and may end up accepting the latter’s terms and proposals.

Civil society organisations have always stated the EU proposals on EPAs threaten the livelihood, industry and development of the West African economies and region. During the meeting some of the Ministers called on their “colleagues to stop dancing salsa with the negotiations, and face up realistically to the fact that they were not in a position to conclude the negotiations, and begin to prepare for that eventuality. It is a pity that their other colleagues did not listen to them,” commented Bibiane Mbaye of ENDA-TM, Senegal.

The civil society organisations noted that a key part of the problem was the unconstructive role played by elements within the ECOWAS commission which was supposed to serve as the secretariat of the meeting. Rather than report faithfully on the deliberations of the experts and the concrete suggestions they put forward to address the problem of the deadline, the secretariat chose to report only the views of its own staff. This persisted into the final report of the meeting of officials prepared by the Commission, in spite of strenous efforts by the official rapporteurs and the participating member governments to correct the distortions. Civil society organisations believe that this did not allow for the Ministers to get a balanced picture of all the options.

This type of behaviour has increasingly become characteristic of the Commission, as it has tended not to translate the wishes of the member-states into negotiating positions, but instead put forward a different agenda. “It is about time the member states re-asserted their leadership of the negotiations” stated Kingley Ofei-Nkansah of General Agricultural Workers Union of Ghana.

Released on: 19/07/07
Reproduced from: A press release by www.twnafrica.org