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Mozambique: Guebuza Describes Lisbon Summit As "Very Positive"
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
10 December 2007
Posted to the web 10 December 2007
Lisbon
Mozambican President Armando Guebuza on Sunday described the weekend Europe-Africa summit in Lisbon as a "very positive" meeting.
Speaking at a press conference, Guebuza said both the African and European leaders present had debated in a frank and open manner all the questions that hindered the development of cooperation between the two continents.
The summit, he added, showed that through dialogue consensus can be reached on many issues that at first sight seemed insoluble.
Guebuza stressed that those who think it is Africa which needs Europe are wrong. Just as centuries ago Europeans set sail to seek markets and precious goods, so today European countries need what Africa has to offer, just as much as Africans need European goods and know-how.
"Indeed, all of us, Africans and Europeans, are interdependent and we need each other", said Guebuza.
He told reporters he was convinced that, despite economic backwardness, Africa could maintain mutually advantageous cooperation with Europe.
"Africa holds negotiations with Europe, just as it does with countries of other continents or blocs, and it does so on a footing of absolute equality", he declared.
He was confident that with the kind of dialogue that marked the two day summit in Lisbon, there would be a growing understanding of the interdependence between Europe and Africa, and between these two continents and the rest of the world.
Some of the same points were made by the chairperson of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Durao Barroso, at the summit's closing press conference, where he spoke along side the current chair of the African Union, Ghanaian President John Kufuor, and host Prime Minister, Jose Socrates.
Barroso too believed that, now more than ever, Africa and Europe need each other. It was because Europe needed African goods that, in the current negotiations over Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs), the quota policy is being abandoned, so that the European market will be open to everything that African countries have to sell.
But EPAs are the subject of separate negotiations, and while some African countries (including Mozambique) have signed an EPA with the European Union, others are refusing to do so, fearing that by opening their markets to an unrestricted inflow of European goods they might stifle their own nascent industries.
"What we want is that the European market should be 100 per cent open to Africa. I repeat, 100 per cent", said Barroso.
He believed that this opening would allow Africa to climb rapidly out of its current economic morass. He thought that over the past 30 years the quota policy has had a negative impact on African exports. 30 years ago Africa accounted for 2.5 per cent of world trade: that figure is now down to 0.9 per cent.
As for the dispute over whether Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe should have been allowed to attend the summit, in light of the European travel ban against Mugabe and other senior figures in his regime, Guebuza remarked that if similar measures were taken against every country that faced severe crises, then rather a lot of states would be banished from the concert of nations.
It was based on a philosophy of solving problems peacefully and through dialogue that other African countries had opposed banning Mugabe from the summit.
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Furthermore, Guebuza added, "this summit was not intended to debate a single country, but to discuss the problems of two continents, Africa and Europe".
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| Copyright © 2007 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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