Abuja — The Minister of Commerce and Industry, Chief Achike Udenwa has said that although Ghana and Cote'dvoire have signed a partial agreement with the European Union on the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA),Nigeria will only sign the agreement if the development issues are agreed.

Speaking in Abuja when a delegation from the European Union visited him, the minister urged the European Union to step up aid to develop the local infrastructure to make the Nigeria's industries competitive enough under the agreement.

He said: "When our own products locally are not competitive to us, we have been saying that even if the market access is there and you removed the tariff for Nigerian goods but then what is the access to us if we are not competitive while at the same time we completely open our borders for your own goods and our local goods cannot compete with your own. This is the main fear."

He said all the other issues in the agreement are circumstantial but the main fear is the meaning of access and that's why they have been stressing on the development agenda within the EPA arrangement to enjoy the benefit of the market access.

Chief Udenwa said although the problem is the same in all other West African countries, Nigeria is being very careful to protect her local industries because it constitutes the larger percentage of the market in the sub-region.

Speaking, the leader of the European Union delegation, Cornelis Keizer, said they have so far made tremendous progress in terms of market access and allowing West Africa more possibilities to deal with consequences of the market access and to keep industrial policies as they said.

He said: "We have made a lot of progress on the development cooperation part of EPA. So there will be accompanying measures that will be aid for trade to help make West Africa especially Nigeria to become more competitive."

On the date of signing the agreement, the EU helmsman said the Chief negotiators at the ECOWAS ministerial level are the ones to set the dateline.

"ECOWAS set 30th October 2009 as the dateline but could not meet it. Detelines come and go but the most important thing is to make progress and we have made a very important progress on the important part of the agreement so we should be certain to conclude but there is no official dateline," he said.