EU, southern African nations kick off trade talks

Published Jul 8, 2004

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Windhoek - Seven southern African countries and the European Union start trade talks Thursday in the Namibian capital Windhoek to resolve differences, including a demand for wider duty-free access to Europe.

The negotiations are between the EU and some members of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) who also double up as members of the 79-nation African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) bloc of poor and developing countries.

They include Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, Swaziland and Tanzania.

The talks will be held under the auspices of the Cotonou Agreement, a trade accord between the EU and developing nations.

"The access of many products to the EU is governed by tariff quota regimes. We ask the EU to broaden duty-free access to all our Economic Partnership members (EPAs) for all products, with immediate effect," Roger Paskin, chairman of the Namibia Agricultural Trade Forum (NATF), told AFP.

"We must express our concern that the import of sometimes heavily subsidised European goods into the SADC region may seriously disrupt local markets and adversely affect development.

"We call for the provision of adequate safeguards in any agreement with the EU," Paskin said.

The Cotonou Agreement undertakes to create free trade areas between groups of developing countries and the EU from 2008. It basically means that poor countries have to open their markets to European products if they want to have access to European markets.

The Cotonou Agreement is to be replaced in a few years' time by a series of separate agreements between the EU and smaller sub-groups of the African, Carribbean and Pacific group.

These groupings will be known as Economic Partnerships, or EPAs.

The NATF and the Namibian Manufacturers' Association have placed their recommendations for the talks as an advertisement in The Namibian newspaper under the headline "Declaration by Concerned Stakeholders".

The groups call for assistance programmes to "address supply side constraints in the smaller and less developed countries of the SADC configuration" to enhance their capacity to attract investment and expand the production base for exports to the EU.

Another concern are the EU standards for product health and safety, which seemed to be changing continuously and becoming ever more stringent, according to Paskin.

Namibia has a duty-free beef export quota of 13 000 tonnes annually to the EU, of which an average of 10 000 tonnes is fulfilled.

"In the upcoming EPA negotiations, Namibia has to insist on the immediate abolishment of all tariffs for its table grapes exported to the EU," he added. - AFP

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