UNCTAD conference, Accra, Ghana

Tuesday 22 April

 

I haven’t yet identified any members of the UK press here so I can’t imagine that news from UNCTAD has been filling the airwaves and the newspaper columns back home. That’s a shame as incredibly important issues are being discussed here.

 

A key theme is south-south trade – trade amongst countries in the global south. It already accounts for a substantial part of world trade and that share will rise. China, India, Brazil and a few others dominate this, and many here at UNCTAD feel that this is also a real opportunity for poorer countries to trade more equitably and beneficially.

 

As deputy trade minister Rob Davies from South Africa said this morning, this is one of many problems with the EU’s proposed economic partnership agreements or EPAs, namely that they will prevent poor countries signing future preferential deals with other southern countries.

 

“The dynamic trading poles are now in the south. Developing countries can no longer afford to lock themselves into traditional North-South trade relations. We will continue to resist this at the WTO and if necessary by not signing the proposed EPA,” he said. His concerns were echoed by Trade Minister Carlos from Brazil and Minister Diop from Senegal at the same meeting.

 

And how does the EU respond to this critique? Well, they are present ‘en masse’ at a lot of the discussions but it sees to be mostly development rather than trade officials who speak and when they do, they kind of miss the points people are making. For example, they’ve been talking a lot about aid-for-trade as if that will make up for the injustices in the proposed trade deals. Africans in particular retort that that risks deepening aid dependence.

 

Incidentally, in the melee after the meeting, I managed to have a quick chat with Rob Davies and to give him a copy of our new report which looks at the impacts of the trade deal South Africa signed with the EU in 1999. I said that our report presented evidence that agricultural products and food processing industries have suffered in South Africa since the deal was signed.

 

He told me how, as they did not get what they wanted out of that original deal especially in these areas, South Africa had hoped that this could have been addressed through the EPA negotiations. But of course, instead the EU has used the new negotiations to push for EU company access on a whole range of new issues like services and investment.

 

On my way to lunch, I stopped off at the EU exhibition stand. As the banner says, there is no doubt that European business is benefiting from EU approach to trade policy – but a lot of people are doubting how widely those benefits stretch beyond Europe’s borders.