Brussels, 06/06/2013 (Agence Europe) - During the afternoon of Thursday 6 June, in Brussels, the joint ACP-EU Council of Ministers opened against a backdrop of disillusionment on the part of the ACP Group of States (African/Caribbean/Pacific). That disenchantment stems from the likelihood that their legitimate demands will not be heard. They do not wish to suffer pressure from their European partners, with the threat being brandished of their duty-free, quota-free access to the European market being withdrawn, for ratification, by the October 2014 deadline, of economic partnership agreements (EPAs) that do not serve the development interests of their nations.
Late afternoon Thursday, the ministerial meeting jointly chaired by Phandu T. C. Skelemani, Botswana's International Minister for Cooperation and President of the ACP Council, and Joe Costello, Irish Minister for Development and International Cooperation, began a discussion on this thorny issue with Karel De Gucht, European Trade Commissioner. The lively debate the previous day, however, within the ACP Council of Ministers, had set the tone of ACP disenchantment. One diplomatic source intimated on Tuesday evening that “the language used in the EPA is no longer diplomatic”. Even the Caribbean region, the only one to have concluded a complete EPA (Cariforum-EU), underlined that a number of EPA provisions relating, in particular, to the joint institutions, cannot be applied given the differences of interpretation between the parties.
The representative for Barbados was highly critical of the fact that the date for entry into force of certain customs tariffs had not been negotiated, to which the EU retorted that this was intrinsic to the agreement. Deploring what he called the peremptory speeches and approaches on the part of the Europeans, the ambassador of Guinea Bissau said (our translation): “We have the impression that there is an attempt to divide us, to break us up, and everything that hitherto bound us together is crumbling. The EU wants us to agree to the lowest common denominator. We must convince our partners of the reasons for our aspirations. If we agree, that will be the destruction of the already weak industrial fabric of our countries. We must make compromises but not to the detriment of the peoples that we represent”. The South African representative said: “We have been negotiating for ten years. Whether results are good or bad, the Europeans want to show that they are in a process imposed by them. It is necessary to save what can be saved. In the short and medium term, the future of our ACP countries lies in intra-ACP trade”.
The ACP countries deplore the great pressure put on them via the changes to the regulation on market access (1528/2007) so that they accept the EPAs not for their beneficial effect on development but from fear of seeing their exports towards the EU broken off - as that is pressure that runs counter to the principles and the spirit of the ACP-EU partnership as set out in the Cotonou Agreement. (AN/transl.jl)