Give us more time on trade, poor states tell EU

from Reuters Africa

By David Lewis

ACCRA - Europe should stop pressuring the world's poorest states to sign individual trade deals and allow more time for African, Caribbean, Pacific (ACP) nations to agree a common negotiating platform, ACP members said on Friday.

A declaration by leaders of the 79-nation ACP group meeting at a summit in Ghana will call on Friday for undisrupted trade access to the European Union market, said Mauritius's Foreign Affairs Minister Arvin Boolell, citing a draft of the document.

The ACP group, which represents 300 million people and includes some of the world's least developed nations, has been struggling to maintain a united front in the face of pressure from Brussels to sign Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA).

The EU says the accords are needed to make its long-running preferential trade arrangements with the ACP compliant with WTO rules, and many of the developing group's members, fearing exclusion from the European market, have signed interim deals.

But ACP leaders say this has fractured the unity of developing countries and weakened their ability as a bloc to negotiate better terms of trade for their often vulnerable, commodity-exporting economies.

"There is a common feature to the ongoing debate -- that solidarity of ACP should not be undermined. The EPA seems to have created division and diversion rather than convergence," Boolell told Reuters.

"It is not simply because we export mostly to the EU that we should feel we are cornered," Boolell added. The ACP nations send more than a quarter of what they export to the EU.

ACP economies, already squeezed by high food and fuel prices, are now facing the risk of reduced aid and investment from the developed world, as a result of its banking crisis.

Outgoing ACP chairman President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan on Thursday accused rich countries of using "blackmail" to bully poor states into accepting bad terms of trade.

Bashir, who faces a possible International Criminal Court (ICC) indictment for war crimes in Sudan's Darfur, left the summit on Thursday without waiting for its conclusion,. He handed the ACP chairmanship to Ghanaian President John Kufuor.

Boolell said a high-level mission of ACP leaders would travel to Europe to lobby for more time for a convergent solution between the two groups on the trade question.

"In between ... summits, we need a troika that will convey the message loud and clear," he said.

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