Accra - Ghana — ECOWAS Member States would have to undertake significant fiscal reforms in order to cope with the loss of tariff revenue that will accompany the implementation of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) being negotiated with the European Union, participants in the concluding phase of a stakeholder workshop said on Tuesday, 7th September 2010. West Africa has conceded to a market access offer for the scheduled liberalisation of 70 per cent of its market over 25 years in its negotiation with the EU with implications for tariff revenue for Member States, most of which are categorised as Least Developed Countries (LDC's) and rely substantially on tariff revenue to fund their public expenditure.
But representatives of the region's academia and the media said at the end of a two-day workshop in Accra that it was 'important to undertake fiscal reforms' as part of the process of adjusting to the post EPA era because of the losses in revenue that will be engendered by the trade liberalisation implicit in the impending agreement. In order to ensure the sustained sensitization of community citizens of the process, they proposed the active involvement of the media with the education of the peoples of the region on the process. The participants, who were the last beneficiaries of a three-part programme of sensitization for Parliamentarians, Private Sector Operators, representatives of civil society, the academia and the media warned of the danger of proceeding with the negotiation process without adequately disseminating information to community citizens. They therefore advised the ECOWAS Commission to produce a simplified document that will aid citizenship sensitization on the process.
They raised the concern that a good number of traders in region were illiterates and then recommended that ECOWAS should device a means of facilitating trade for such groups of people so as to protect them from falling victim of the complexities of the agreement. They also called on the negotiators to resolve the varied divergences that arise in the text namely the agreement on the scope and duration of West Africa's tariff liberalisation, the status of Community Levies on goods from third countries, the utilisation of the most favoured nation clause and the role of the political non-execution clause in a trade agreement. Furthermore, they suggested that the theoretical structures used in the Computable General Equilibrium Model to stimulate the impact of the EPA on Member States and its fiscal impact be provided to member states and verified. Such an exercise, they added, would ensure that it reflects regional peculiarities while validating the credibility and quality of the data used.
They commended the ECOWAS and UEMOA Commissions for their initiative in sensitizing the academia and the media and then recommended their continuous engagement in the process in order to ensure citizen awareness and ownership of the process. In remarks at the closing, the ECOWAS Commissioner for Trade, Customs, Free Movement and Tourism, Alhaji Mohammed Daramy sought to address some of the concerns raised by the participants including the impact of the loss of the Community levy on the organisation. He said that the eradication of the levy on imports from third countries into the region would create uncertainty in financing regional activities, programmes and projects, result in lack of sustainability of such programmes, compel the burden of funding the two institutions in the region on a few Member States and put the region in a dilemma about finding alternative sources of funding.
