• Lome and Cotonou

Lome and Cotonou

This report examines the negotiations between the European Union and the Pacific ACP states for a Pacific regional Economic Partnership Agreement. It aims to provide churches, NGOs, unions, politicians and other activists with the knowledge to intervene critically and effectively in the process, which they can then translate into more accessible and creative forms for their own communities.

Key points of the study include:

• describing the relationship between the former European colonial powers and their ex-colonies in Africa, the Caribbean and Pacific as a ‘partnership’ fails to disguise the ongoing power relationship through which Europe tries to dictate the economic, social and political development agenda of those countries
• the economic, political and aid dimensions of the Lomé Conventions reflected Europe’s development ideology. By the time of Lomé IV in the 1990s, aid funding through the European Development Fund was used to complement the IMF/World Bank structural adjustment agenda, using ‘good governance’ conditionalities that required ACP governments to pursue neoliberal policies in the name of development and alleviating poverty
• the ACP failed to take the initiative and confront the European Union with an alternative development agenda and proposals for a post-Lomé relationship. By adopting a defensive position that tried to adapt, rather than challenge, the EU proposals they bought into a global free market model whose impacts they then tried to minimise
• the primary objective of the new relationship, reflected in the Cotonou Agreement of 2000, is to enable European powers to shed their historic responsibilities to their former colonies and refocus their energies and resources on the new priorities of European expansion and competition with the US to dominate the world economy
• economic and trade negotiations under Cotonou are required to produce ‘WTO compatible’ outcomes, further cementing the hegemony of the WTO at a time when it faces a crisis of legitimacy and bringing non-WTO Members within the ACP under its rules
• the description of reciprocal trade agreements as ‘Economic Partnership Agreements’ feeds an illusion that these are about cooperation and partnership, rather than profits and power
• the claim that granting reciprocal free trade access into ACP markets for European goods will promote sustainable development and poverty alleviation is outrageous as reciprocal trade in goods will threaten the survival of small local business and wage-earning jobs, with no guarantee that any replacements will emerge
• the alternatives available to ACP countries that decide not to participate in reciprocal trade arrangements – the Everything But Arms option for Least Developed Countries and the General System of Preferences for ‘developing’ countries - carry fewer risks, but leave those countries at the whim of the European Union which can alter or eliminate those arrangements at will.

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