In recent days, the European Union and African leaders met in Lisbon, Protugal to discuss a new trade deal and human rights. The theme of the talks were to forge a new partnership on issues including security, development, trade and good governance. This ambitious agenda arose from an imminent deadline set by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2000 asking the trade partners to fix anticompetitive and market distorting arrangements that put the other members of the WTO at a disadvantage.
The Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) negotiated in the past have also angered developing country partners who felt that the power to decide on trade terms was in the hands of Europe, which still acted in authority based on its past colonial power and influence on Africa and its leaders.
This time round some of these leaders, like Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade are not keeping quiet and have expressed the view that the new trade deals--with individual African countries also having the power to sign on their own, which some 13 of the East African block of countries have already done on an interim basis-- will damage their fragile economies.
Europe's offer to the group of countries known as African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP)nations, consisted mainly of some re-working of the terms of the former Cotonou Agreement, the original EPA granting preferential treatment to developing countries, which regulated trade in various areas of agriculture and manufacturing (particularly textile for example) between the EU and the ACP countries.
The recent rows emerged when African leaders realised that the deals proposed by German Chancellor and Chairman of the Summit, Angela Merkel and other leaders at the table in Lisbon, were to replace agreements which gave former European colonies preferential trade terms- to demand that African countries open their markets to European goods in order to keep tariff-free EU access for their own exports. This has a potential to raise tariffs that are now granted on a preferential basis and often not exceeding the average 2-8% duty levels on import goods from African countries into the EU.
The preferential system the EU currently has in place with the ACP has been ruled illegal by the WTO, and by 1st january 2008, the partners will have to trade on the basis of a new EPA which will open their markets to European goods gradually. For those who are already thinking like us that a simple solution for these beleaguered African leaders to come out on top as winners is to stay away from signing a new EPA that would effectively tie up their hands behind their backs.
The dangers of not signing the agreement, however, is quite serious and would include, for example, that Namibia's beef, grape and fish exports could virtually cease from next year as it loses preferential access to European markets. According to Jurgen Hoffmann, a trade advisor to the Agricultural Forum of Namibia, beef products, in the absence of a deal in place by 1st January 2008, would attract import duties of 63%-120%, as opposed to the average 8% duty paid now. What this means for ordinary Namibians producing or selling these products is that beef prices in Namibia are estimated to fall by 25% next year and by 50% the following year. Hunger, hardship and poverty would undoubltedly follow such events.
For a small country depending on its beef industry for national income and foreign currencies, it would also mean that fish, which entered the EU duty-free under Cotonou, will attract duties of up to 20%. The grapes products sector will suffer from raw open competition with the powerful South Africans and the Chileans who are producers on a much larger scale and can therefore flood the markets with their goods at lower prices considering large volumes, therefore undermining another industry for Namibians. But Namibia was still taking the position earlier in the year that it would still not sign the new deal!
Despite positive pronouncements from the current EC president Portugals's Prime Minister Jose Socrates that the Summit could be heralded as a 'summit of equals', he also surprisingly stated that he was satisfied in himself that the meeting had taken place at all. Well, the Dread Team believes that if a small developing country like Namibia decides to stay out of a deal that could damage its industries and increase unemployment for its peoples rather than ratifying it shows how much worse the consequences are to sign rather than not signing at all!
How, at the end the 7th year of the 21st century, can former European colonies still be able to dictate the terms of trade and tariff duties to sovereign independent nations who shook off the chains of colonial sugjugation and oppression during the feverish independence movement eras of the 1950s and 1960s?
For the most part, the position of power taken by the EU countries is an illusion, smoking mirrors because most of the 25 current members have never owned colonies or never had an empire to speak of. For instance the most recent members of the EU who joined on 1st January 2007, Bulgaria and Romania can speak of no colonial past or influence of their own proper yet are able to sit at a table with the other 25 EU countries facing the African leaders (include the true culprits of the Germans, Brits, French, Dutch and Portuguese for instance, to name a few)and determining the terms of trade on the 'principle' or assumption of past colonial influence, which in their mind really means that some form of tight leash should be maintained on these former colonies and ACP countries for a long while to come still.
How can this idiotic situation still prevail when African leaders, or no one in the ACP group for that matter, should no longer be told what to do like simple-minded children needing the paternalistic protection and edicts of its powerful masters?
Africa and Africans are tired of these summits created to be photo oppos for European leaders who temporarily escape the rigours of domestic political opposition and machinery for a weekend in order to act as great owners and dealers of the world's most precious commodities. Well, they also accuse the African leadres of the same, by the way. It is a chance for them to tell other nations, mainly the African ones such as Zimbabwe and its infamous President Robert Mugabe, how to govern and behave itself in this 'world of equals'.
The Dread Team denounces the hypocrisy and mean-spiritedness of these new trade deals which instead of agreement, will generate much more DIsagreement and conflict in future between the EU and Africa.
Africa is on its knees and asking for survival, Europe is handing it a very dry old bread which it is trying to persuade Africans tastes like a fresh new loaf.
We simply won't have it. The struggle for economic equality and prosperity continues, but can we Africans and ACP country members find a solution for us, by us? Why was the Summit not deemed an EU-African Union (AU) Summit, you will ask? Simply because it is still useful for our former colonial masters to divide us and rule us (and exploit us) in the confusion they create, rather than deal with the strength and eminent economic position of Africa that the AU should continue to grow towards and strive towards single-mindedly. We are our own masters now!
There is still time for, no, rather, IT IS time for Africa to rise up, stand up, look at Europe and the rest of the world straight in the eye! We are the masters of our own destinies; let us use that influence to built strong and proud nations that can feed, educate and care for their own while also exporting its useful resources to the rest of the world on an advantageous trading basis. We must exercise our own power and throw our own weight around in this global jungle full of bullies, the biggest of which remains the US, even in unilateral trade terms. Then maybe the rest of the world will notice, and finally start caring about us and the fate of our children, and of our children's children on this planet.
Poverty and subjugation to former masters of another era is not the legacy we want to leave them! Equality will never come from the generosity which Europe sees in its own hands to dispense, but rather from AfriKans taking concrete actions to demand, obtain and effect political and economic equality on the world stage. It is due time the rest of the world finally heeds the voice of Africa and its children.
Africa Unite
The Dread Team
