UNITE TO STOP EU RE-COLONISATION- STOP EPAs NOW!

The 6^th Summit of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States from September 30-October 3, 2008 in Accra, Ghana takes place when the evidence is mounting, right across the world, of the extreme destructiveness of maintaining and upholding unbridled so-called ‘free market economics’ as the only method and means of organizing and managing economies. The ACP governments must draw the fullest lessons of this in any decisions they take to manage and address their economic relations and challenges, such as the fuel price crisis, the fallout of global financial crisis and the relentless price inflation in basic food that have engulfed hundreds of millions of people in ACP countries, bringing many to the brink of renewed threat of starvation and sparking turmoil and food riots across these regions. We urge that one of the lessons must be the renunciation of the free trade ‘Economic Partnership Agreements’ (EPAs) between the ACP and the European Union (EU).
Indeed, ACP economies face unprecedented and extreme economic challenges in the coming period. This is the worst time to institutionalize free trade regimes even more deeply and fundamentally than they have already taken root.
The majority of ACP states are among those whose productive Agricultural sectors have been greatly weakened by hasty and excessive trade liberalization that has allowed cheap and illegally subsidized imports, often from Europe, to wipe out domestic production even in their home markets. Because of such liberalization, too many ACP economies have transitioned from relative food self-sufficiency to food import dependency in an extremely short time. Such economies will have no protection whatsoever from the imported inflation – through food imports – that is already wrecking, and will continue to wreck lives in the ACP regions, which are amongst the poorest in the world. EPAs will increase this vulnerability. In addition, such imports will continue undermine what remains of local production even further, over the longer term. And: EPAs will make this permanent.
Added to the devastation of inflation is the threat of looming global recession. The slowdown of economies is starting and spreading from the main Western economies. Major European economies, the most important single destination of ACP exports will slowdown. As the British government now openly admits, it is faced with its worst economic crises in 60 years. Inevitably, this downturn will also mean a drop in demand for ACP exports. Market failure and inflation threatens to wipe out the relative growth that many ACP primary commodity exporters have enjoyed in just the last few years, while intensifying the competition they face. Already, ACP share of trade in the EU, their single most important market, has fallen relative to other competitors. As a September 2008 UN report on Africa’s performance under trade liberalization shows – Africa’s export market share has dropped from 6% to 3% of world trade since the 1980s, the self-same period that trade liberalization and structural adjustment were ruthlessly brought to power and installed as one-party dictators in the continents economic policy regime. As with all dictatorships we were told: “there is no alternative”. EPAs are a continuation and not an alternative to the disastrous trade performance of developing regions due to sweeping trade liberalization.
The disaster of such loss of market share cannot be compensated for by making the protection of marginal preferences for ACP primary commodity exports to EU markets the heart of ACP trade and economic policy – as the whole world knows the value of those preferences are being eroded every day, because of global lowering of tariffs in the WTO and through bilateral free trade agreements. By making a virtue of this necessity of ‘preferences’ for ACP primary products, EPAs offer no means of addressing ACP loss of market share, i.e. ACP marginalization, in world trade and the world economy.
Moreover, ACP marginalization is also due to a failure to diversify ACP economies and exports. Only this week in Brussels, trade delegations from the Pacific region warned that accepting EU’s insistence that Pacific Island (and other ACP) countries should remove protection of the infant industries within 20 years will remove “our space to give time for our infant industries to mature before entering what is going to be a very competitive global trading environment [and] will retard industrial development in our countries. Giving up this right forever will be the highest price we will pay and we just simply cannot afford that”. As there is no ‘sunset’, i.e. no time limit, on the duration of the EPAs, the word “forever” is like eternal damnation. EPAs will prevent and paralyze the development, industrialization and diversification of ACP economies forever.
Aid will also dry up as the advanced economies bail out their financial sectors from the excesses of liberalization. The EU has made it clear that there is no new substantive ‘aid’ to address EPA implementation and adjustment costs. Rather they insist that ACP countries make up the cost by introducing and imposing reforms on their suffering populations – including tax reforms that target the informal sector and the consumption of goods and services by working people and the poor. This must be set against the fact that EPA measures to eliminate trade taxes and to further liberalize and reduce taxation on ‘investors’ means that the tax burden for EU commodities and multinational companies is eliminated or reduced, while more taxation of the ACP poor is introduced or increased. EPA will increase poverty and inequality within the ACP and between the ACP and other regions, especially the EU itself.
The regressive tax reforms are among the ‘conditions’ for EU disbursement of their part of their ‘contribution’ to ‘mitigate’ the cost of adjustment and implementation of EPAs for ACP countries. No doubt falling ACP government revenue from trade and customs duties will add to their dependence on aid. But this ‘aid’, as we have seen, will not be forthcoming. EPAs will increase ACP aid dependency and EUs use and abuse of aid conditionality – even as they cut aid flows.
The danger of this increase and abuse of ‘aid conditionality’ by the EU has already been manifest in the EPA process, as was borne out by the public row that broke out between Pacific and EU officials over the latter’s threat to withhold flows of already-existing ‘aid’ if the Pacific did not accept EU demands in the EPA. The future looks dire indeed.
But the damage can be repaired. ACP governments have the responsibility and the authority to take measures to do this. They must:

• Re-open and review all ‘EPA agreements’, both interim EPAs and comprehensive EPAs that were initialed in November and December 2007. These so-called ‘agreements’ were emergency defensive measure taken at the end of 2007 under the undue pressure of the EU’s threat to disrupt exports from ACP countries into the European market. They were ‘initialed’ as statements of intent under conditions of extreme pressures, and cannot be accepted as being legally binding and can be challenged and blocked altogether on the basis of a number of legal instruments, such as the Vienna Convention on International Treaties. The EU parliament’s report on ‘Development Impact of EPAs’ (ref: 2008/2170 (INI)), dated 17^th September 2008, recounts how ACP countries “were pushed” into these so-called agreements without options or alternative transitional solutions (which the EU was and is under legal obligation to ensure) such as “extending GSP+ to all ACP countries”.
• Suspend all negotiations towards free trade agreements on ‘Trade in Services’ with the EU, as the Pacific region has just done. Services must not be part of the EPAs.
• Reject the inclusion of Trade-Related Issues in the EPAs – i.e. the ‘Singapore Issues’ such as Investment and Government Procurement (public tenders and contracts), which in any case they have already rejected in the WTO but are being imposed on them through the backdoor of EPAs. It is doubtful that many of the ACP regions negotiating the EPAs even have a legal mandate to include these Singapore Issues in the negotiation. The special inquiry into the EPAs commissioned by French President Sarkozy (in his capacity as EU President), known as ‘the Taubira report’ recommends removing Singapore and Trade-related Issues from the EPAs as a vital measure to restore ACP countries’ confidence in the EU’s good faith.
• Resolve to negotiate and agree a non-reciprocal ‘goods only’ EPAs with the EU, as the Government of Guyana has put forward.
• Insist on the removal of punitive tariffs imposed by the EU on exports from ACP countries, such as Nigeria, who have so far not completely buckled under EU pressure to agree ‘interim EPAs’. As the above referred to EU Parliamentary report of September 17 clearly and forcefully reminds: “neither the conclusion nor the renunciation of an EPA should lead to a situation where an ACP country may find itself in a less favourable position than it was under the trade provisions of the Cotonou Agreement”. The punitive taxes imposed by the EU on the vulnerable Nigerian cocoa sector, already costing millions of dollars in the last few months alone, is against the legally binding provisions of the Cotonou Agreement and the EU’s legal obligations. That the EU is prepared to impose draconian taxes on products from the poorest economies and regions of the world, simply to get its way of securing the monopoly of its commodities, companies and capital over those regions, is simply unconscionable and unacceptable. The ACP must reject this categorically and demand its removal. This support to countries such as Nigeria against EU trade aggression is also necessary to re-build the ACP unity that has been badly strained and shattered by the EPA process so far.
• Take all measures to ensure ACP unity at sub-regional and pan-ACP levels in the EPAs. The coordination and harmonization of ACP positions and of the minimum trade reform measures that prevent disruption of fragile export sectors WHILST satisfying WTO compatibility requires the foundational pillar of unity between ACP LDCs and non-LDCs through their universal access to EBA and GSP+ export regimes. The unity of ACP sub-regions and the ACP as a whole also requires an insistence on the minimum that is acceptable to all – i.e. a non-reciprocal ‘goods only’ trade agreement with the EU. This is the only sure basis for Regional Integration and South-South cooperation for ACP countries.
• Reject all pressures to short-circuit and side-step democratic constitutional rules for the ratification and adoption of international treaties by Parliaments of ACP member-states. Parliaments and other stakeholders are being marginalized by the EPA process. All parliamentary statements and reports from across the ACP and in the EU itself warns against the grave anti-development impact of an all encompassing free trade EPA between for ACP countries, because free trade agreements between countries and economies at diametrically opposed levels of development will have only one winner. The EU is the world’s largest trading bloc, while ACP regions are amongst the poorest in the world.

As Guyana’s President said when he took the case against the EPA and its profound anti-developmental dangers before the UN General Assembly last week: “”Even at this late hour, I wish to plead [for the] review [of] these agreements before they irretrievably harm  … the ACP (African, Caribbean and Pacific states).”
As civic organizations from across the ACP we demand that ACP leaders stand up and measure up to their primary responsibilities to their peoples.
There is no time when such leadership has been so needed to affirm the continued relevance and to assure the future of the ACP group. There has scarcely ever been a greater necessity for bold leadership that not only protects our economies while ensuring that unworkable and disastrous orthodoxies, especially that of unbridled free market liberalization and free trade, are reversed.
Today the lessons cannot be clearer. Even in the midst of the orgy of greed and chaos that is engulfing financial markets in the advanced countries, the very heartlands of the powers who insist that developing countries and regions must liberalise and open their economies and subject their peoples’ welfare wide open to the turbulence and supposed creative destruction of market forces, the notion of direct governmental action to regulate, intervene in and to protect thresholds of economic viability is taking hold – more than that, the practice of such re-regulation and interventionism is already far ahead of free-market ideas and propaganda, as the $700 billion US government bailout and the nationalizations of banks on both sides of the Atlantic attest. ACP leaders cannot be seen to behave like the pupils who dogmatically want outdo their ‘masters’, long after those masters have themselves jettisoned their own diktats.
For our part, as civic organizations and activists we will continue in our determination to Stop the EPAs altogether. The growing voices and opposition of women’s organizations, farmers groups, trade unionists, students, NGOs, and diverse range of actors in and beyond the ACP must be raised more than ever. The ACP includes many hundreds of millions; it brings together the largest number of countries in any one grouping, apart from the UN General Assembly. Its voice, our voice, is the voice of democracy.
Today, the Africa Trade Network and the Economic Justice Network of Ghana give expression to that voice and say: Stop the EPAs now. We hope and enjoin all of you to join us to fight for and win this legitimate demand. Get Up, Stand Up!
Accra, September 29, 2008.