Brussels, 22/06/2012 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 21 June, MEPs on the international trade committee called on the European Commission to give struggling African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries two more years for negotiations on their Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) before withdrawing their free access to the EU market. The committee voted (by 25 votes to two, with two abstentions) to approve the report by David Martin (S&D, UK) amending the proposal modifying Annex I of Council Regulation 1528/2007 to exclude a number of countries for the list of regions or states that have concluded negotiations.
The committee voted to extend the 2014 deadline proposed by the Commission and give these ACP countries until 2016 to ratify their EPAs before losing the right to duty-and-quota-free access to the EU that they have enjoyed since 2007.
Thirty-six ACP countries have been able to access EU markets freely under the Market Access Regulation since the EU negotiated EPAs with them in 2007, even though they were not ready to apply the EPAs in full and ratify them. At present, a number of them have still not taken the steps needed to ratify their EPAs. The Commission therefore wants to switch eight of them to other, less advantageous, preference schemes. These eight countries are Botswana and Namibia plus six poorer countries, namely Cameroon, Fiji, Ghana, Ivory Coast, Kenya and Swaziland. MEPs of the committee say these countries are still grappling with development needs and poverty and would be hit by sharply reduced access to EU markets and therefore need until 2016 to prepare for the EPAs. Another nine ACP countries - the poorest in the group - will not be affected by the new arrangements as they continue to benefit from the EU's “Everything But Arms” (EBA) duty-free, quota-free scheme for the least-developed countries. They are Burundi, Comoros, Haiti, Lesotho, Mozambique, Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia. (LC/transl.rt)