• EPA

EPA

The Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) being negotiated between the European Union (EU) and African countries are likely to exacerbate the food import surges from Europe. In the EPAs negotiations, tariffs for EU products entering Africa will mostly be brought down to zero. However, agricultural safeguards have been included in the various interim EPAs which several African countries have initialled at the end of 2007. Will these safeguards be able to protect Africa’s agricultural industry from injury in the context of completely liberalising most agricultural products? This is what the current paper is trying to figure out.

The paper states that there are two types of safeguards which have been provided for in the EPAs:

• multilateral safeguards
• bilateral safeguards

It indicates that multilateral safeguards have not been useful at all for most African countries. In fact, as far as the multilateral safeguard is concerned, the EU is at an advantage over the majority of developing countries (DCs). The bilateral safeguard would therefore be what African countries would rely on. The paper underlines that the interim EPAs provide for a bilateral safeguard. Nevertheless, this is more difficult to invoke than the Special Safeguard Provision (SSG) which the EU has enjoyed through the World Trade Organisation (WTO). The paper finds it puzzling that the EPA bilateral safeguard for African countries is much more restrictive than the SSG the EU has thus far enjoyed.

Additionally, the paper mentions that safeguards are a safety net. Hence, African countries should ensure that their tariff levels allow producers to have access to the domestic market, so that the conditions are conducive for agricultural production to be increased. That is, the domestic markets are not dumped by imports. The paper also deals with the implications of safeguards on countries’ common external tariff. It asks whether regional blocks will be required to invoke the safeguard or not. And if that is the case, will safeguards be effective for the country needing protection? The paper, consequently, wonders how will regions manage their common external tariffs in such cases.

The paper concludes that there is a necessity to have high enough common external tariffs, particularly in the area of agriculture. This prevents breaking the tariff set for a region, and increases agricultural production capacities even in the face of asymmetrical agricultural trade in favour of the EU. Otherwise, EPAs would continue constraining African countries' ability to put a stop to unwanted import surges, thus formulating a major challenge for the development of African countries.

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