EU must boldly address the issues!
New Era, Namibia
EU must boldly address the issues!
By Kae Matundu-Tjiparuro
2 July 2010
As you may be well aware, Namibia has yet to sign the Interim Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union (EU). It is gratifying to see the EU, in the face of Namibian insistence, eventually shifting and being prepared to further listen to Namibia, negotiating and thrashing out Namibia’s reservations about the contents of the IEPA.
Contrary to the initial hardened attitude of especially the European Trade Commissioner, Karel de Gucht, the IEPA talks are due to resume this month. Central to these talks are Namibia’s concerns. It is also re-assuring to see Namibia’s partner states in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), despite having signed the agreement already, now squaring up behind her and its position for issues which remain ambivalent to be clarified in the least, or at most that the EU gives a firm commitment that at one stage or another they shall be properly, honestly and cordially be addressed in a spirit of partnership.
One cannot but also note the European non-governmental organisations’ stance on the matter, adding their voice to the Namibian Government’s concerns. All along, Namibia seemed to be a lone voice in what are essentially pertinent matters as far as the new trade regime between the EU and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries, replacing the last such trade regime, Lome 1V, which essentially expired in 2000. So to speak, the new EU-ACP trade deal is well past midnight, as it was expected to have been concluded by September 2007. Namibia has been the hold-up, giving the impression that somehow it has been intransigent being the odd country in the SADC folder that has not signed the Interim EPA.
She has not been without her reasons. The EU, as much as it is yet to become the best market for Namibian goods and services, is nevertheless an important market.
Thus it could not have been expected of her to jump into a new deal without the necessary caution. More so, given the fact that the new deal contains many loose ends needing tightening up. Tighten these loose ends and we are on board! This is simply what we have been saying all along, which is not asking too much at all.
Namibia’s cautiousness entering into a new deal may not be informed by her personal experience alone, but that of many other ACP countries, the wretched nations of the current and ever unequal world economic order.
And Europe cannot pretend to be without any blemish in this regard. Despite years of trading between the European Union and the ACP countries, one is even hesitant to refer to this relationship as one among equal partners, unsure about to what extent the ACP countries have actually been benefitting from this trade relationship in a balanced way, let alone in a way balanced in their favour. After three to four decades of engagement between the EU and their ACP trading partners, there is little to show for how the ACP countries have advanced on the various indicators they were meant to benefit by terms of this engagement. The ACP’s underperformance in trade is an open book with its share of the market at one point falling from 3.4 percent to 1.1 percent.
Where its products have managed to reach the European market, the range has also been limi-ted and confined to a few products and diversification of their products has thus been a pipe dream. The very same underdevelopment the ACP countries inherited from their former colonial masters is the very same condition they are still wrestling with today with their economies marked by under-industrialisation, despite the good intensions of the trade deal. If these seem to be the experiences of many ACP countries that have been in this relationship longer than Namibia, how can Namibia then, during her relatively short existence as a sovereign nation, be expected to take the new deal at face value? Given this re-awakening realisation, dare one really blame her cautiousness not to enter any trade deal, however well meaning, blindly?
This is simply the context of Namibia’s seeming intransigent stance. Unfortunately, while one would have expected much understanding for her position, what is thrown in one’s face is an attitude of intransigence, strangely enough from apparent equal and smart partners. The issues that Namibia has been raising are issues like the Most Favoured Nation or the MFN clause requiring countries to treat all trading partners equally; the liberalisation of services, which is about opening up one’s borders to all sorts of services and products from the EU, while Namibia sees the need for the protection of her infant industries, before leaving them at the mercy of European companies that may still have protection and subsidies in their home countries.
Then there is the issue of Rules of Origin, which for Namibia and its Southern African Customs Union can be a tricky matter.
Needless to say, these and others are all matters that Namibia, its SACU and SADC partners, and indeed all ACP countries are wary about being bamboozled into just like that but need to prepare well and with time as the process of establishing a new economic trade cooperation is not a simple one.
It entails them making sure how such a trade regime would dovetail with other regimes, bilateral and multilateral, and sub-regional, regional and international.
It’s a process that demands give and take among many different players.
Most crucially as at this stage it is hard for one to forecast the benefits any one country can reap from it, as much as the negatives, meticulousness is utmost in dealing with the necessary adjustments that may necessary, especially in terms of the negatives. Not that one can hold much brief, and anticipate much from the new deal in view of the neo-colonial experiences of the ACP countries vis-à-vis forerunning trade regimes.
The ACP countries have largely been caught in a dependent web of still exporting raw materials in terms of previous trade regimes. But due to a lack of a better alternatives on the globalised scenario, an euphemism for the continued exploitative relations between the developed and developing world they have been compelled to remain tied to the apron strings of their former colonial masters in the name of trade.
A glimpse into the Cotonou Agreement reveals loud and clear that economic and trade cooperation should be based on “a comprehensive approach, which builds on the strengths and achievements of the previous ACP-EC Conventions”. On its side the EU agreed that “trade liberalisation shall build on the acquis and shall aim at improving current market access for the ACP countries through inter alia, a review of the rules of origin”.
Namibia is simply informed by such a spirit well cognisant that in its current form the deal need much more polishing to avoid any ambivalence, now or later.
So the onus is on the EU to assure Namibia, and her ACP fellow travelers that they do not have anything to fear from the new trade deal. Until then her legitimate fears and misgivings shall remain an issue against the good wish of progress in signing the IEPA!
