Accra — Ghana's Minister of Trade and Industry, Honourable Hanna Tetteh on Monday in Accra urged regional experts involved with the negotiation of the Economic Partnership Agreement with the European Union to help the region avoid a situation where the non conclusion of the agreement will leave the region with different trade regimes.
The negotiation for a free trade agreement between the two regions was launched in 2004 following the adoption of the road map and was expected to have been concluded in 2007 but has been inconclusive because of divergences between the two parties. In order to avoid losing the preferences they enjoy in exporting to countries of the EU, Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana initialled an interim agreement with the EU in December 2010 which is expected to lapse with the conclusion of the regional EPA.
Opening the meeting of regional experts and their counterparts from Mauritania, the minister said the region was in a delicate position with the seven year old negotiation, warning of the dangers posed to regional integration by a multiplicity of trade regimes in the aftermath of the non conclusion of the regional EPA.
The negotiations have been dogged by difficulties over divergences on a variety of issues mainly the financing of the EPA Development Programme ( EPADP), a 16 billion dollar programme for addressing the costs of adjustment and implementation of the EPA; the status of the community levy for funding ECOWAS; the most favoured nation (MFN clause and the scope of market access offer. Regional leaders had requested for a credible source of funding the programme in new funds from the EU which is rather arguing that the programme be funded from existing funds under the European Development Fund (EDF) and other sources. There are also disagreements over the schedule of opening of West Africa's markets to products from the EU which is insisting on an 80 per cent market access over 12 to 15 years contrary to the West Africa offer of 70 per cent of its market to be liberalized over 25 years. T
he region is worried that opening it's market so widely over a short period will result in the swamping of the region with products from the EU which will virtually destroy West Africa's burgeoning industries including it's agriculture which will suffer from subsidized products from the EU. The two day meeting of the experts, the first the meeting of May 2010 on Bamako, is to enable ECOWAS officials brief the experts on the status of implementation of the recommendations of the last meeting of the Ministerial Monitoring Committee also held in Bamako.
They will also be briefed on the progress on the thematic areas of the negotiations, the EPA Development Programme (EPADP), the draft text of the EPADP Protocol and the market access offer, the Protocol on the rules of origin, the preparations for negotiations of trade in services, the creation of an EPA fund and the Common External Tariff (CET) for the region. The meeting will be followed on Wednesday, 30th November 2011 by that of the Ministerial Monitoring Committee (MMC), the ministers responsible for the negotiating the EPA in Member States.
