REPA Booklet - Stop Epa

An Adjustment Compensation Fund: to provide additional resources and support for adjustment to address
revenue loss, unemployment, upgrading of productive structures and human resources, and building institutional
capacity.
“The dangling of
development aid
by EU has
triggered fast
emotions by each
configuration to
rush the process
so as to be the
first in concluding
an EPA.”
(Richard Kamidza,
SEATINI 2004)
Didn’t the Cotonou Agreement say the ACP States could decide their own models of development?
Indeed! Chapter 2 ‘The Actors of the Partnership’ begins in Article 4 by saying:
The ACP States shall determine the development principles, strategies and models of their economies
and society in all sovereignty.
But these are negotiations in which the European side holds the upper hand. Many of the ACP’s principles
would also require amendments to WTO rules, which could only be achieved with the Commission’s support.
How did the ACP Group want to conduct the negotiations?
They were determined that the major negotiations should take place at an all-ACP level. Member States were
already stretched across a range of negotiations at the WTO, the Caribbean States were doing battle with the
US over the Free Trade Agreement for the Americas, Southern Africa was coming to terms with NEPAD (New
Partnership for Africa’s Development) and the Pacific Islands were facing the implementation of the Pacific Island
Countries Trade Agreement (PICTA) among themselves plus the Pacific Agreement on Closer Economic
Relations (PACER) with Australia and New Zealand. The only way they could cope was to build their collective
negotiating capacity and prepare analyses, including impact studies, to guide them.
How would this work?
They proposed 2 phases:
Phase 1 - from September 2002 to September 2003: This would cover the principles and scope of Economic
Partnership Agreements, their content, and rules to cover special and different treatment, financing of adjustment,
rules of origin, sanitary and phytosanitary rules, framework agreement on services, development aspects of
services, fisheries, trade-related issues, investment and promotion, and much more.
Phase 2 - From September 2003 to December 2007: regional and country-level negotiations would focus on
tariff schedules and sectors of specific interest to those countries.
How did they think all this could be achieved by 2007?
That was the timeline established by the European Commission during the Cotonou negotiations and presented
to, and approved by, the WTO at the Doha Ministerial Conference in 2001. It was obviously reckless for ACP
governments to try to achieve this, and the antithesis of the ‘good governance’ that the European Union was so
insistent on. But no government was prepared to say up-front that it couldn’t be done.
Did the Commission agree to the ACP’s approach?
No! The Commission agreed to initial discussions from September 2002 to September 2003 at an all-ACP level,
but only for the purpose of clarification. Formal negotiations had to be conducted at the regional level.
Why didn’t the ACP governments just walk away?
All the ACP States would have had to agree to do that, which was never likely. They were focused on the short
term and had no alternative game plan. Most governments wanted to maintain their existing preferences at least
until 2007, and hoped they might secure something useful beyond that. There was also the bribe of aid money
through the European Developing Fund. In theory, this was separate. In practice, the Commission and the
Cotonou Agreement itself stressed the link between trade and aid. In return, the ACP governments opened the
door to a whole raft of new commitments that could easily outweigh those short-term benefits.
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A People’s Guide To The Pacific’s Economic Partnership Agreement