Accra — Anti-Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) campaigners started their three-day meeting here with a warning that they will intensify their public campaigns ahead of the December 31 deadline.

The campaigners from across the African continent are meeting in the Ghanaian capital under the auspices of Accra-based civil society group, Third Africa Network (TWN) Africa, will in the next three days try to influence public opinion - including lobbying the media - on the EPAs.

"The coming period is an important one to our campaigns," said TWN Africa Coordinator, Dr Yao Graham. "We have concluded a two-day media workshop on the EPAs to bring the media to their attention on what we will be doing in the coming months."

The EPAs, which will be a new form of trade between the Eurozone and ACP nations, are currently a hot issue that has pitted ministers of finance against civil society movements across the continent.

Under the EPAs, Europe is proposing to the ACP in a 'scratch-my-back-and-I-will-scratch-yours' type of trade in which goods from the Eurozone economies will be tariff-free when they enter ACP markets and vice versa. But civil society argues that Africa will lose revenues from tariffs, which will otherwise be used in the socio economic development.

For example, the abolition of tariffs will have a huge impact on West Africa, which is the single biggest ACP region with an annual Gross National Product (GNP) of $162 billion.

Graham said ATN has done a lot of lobbying and public mobilisation, although there are still challenges ahead. It is expected that at the end of the meeting, whatever ATN agrees to do, it will be able to interface with the official stances on the negotiations. It is expected that by end of October, most of the regional groupings on the African continent might have taken decisions on whether to sign the EPAs; if they have not signed, however, Europe will go ahead and implement them.

The Caribbean is said to be ready to conclude the EPAs by end of this month.

The campaigners are holding this strategy meeting with some proposals for alternatives for the negotiations in their hands.

For example, the campaigners argue that although the European Union (EU) says there is no alternative to the EPAs, other alternatives like the Generalised System of Preference (GSP) Plus Scheme exist.

Under the GSP Plus Scheme, the EU allows ACP countries a high-level market access without breaking the World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules.

The other alternative the campaigners want heard is the proposal of the gradual approach in which ACP economies will be given a grace period in which to build capacity rather than the December 31 deadline.

"EPAs are more or less the re-colonisation of Africa," said Tetteh Hormeku, TWN Africa Head of Programmes. "If we do not charge tariffs, it will substantially have an impact on trade and 80 percent of trade will be lost."

Hormeku believes that EPAs will be a violation of Article 24 of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which is now the WTO, which stipulates that no country should discriminate against another. "We want to demand that if we open, we cannot go beyond 40 percent (the figure of tariff-free goods). WTO says you must be transparent," Hormeku added.