WINDHOEK – The last round of EPA negotiations between the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the European Commission (EC) took place in Johannesburg, South Africa in the first week of this month.
Despite some remaining unresolved issues, progress was achieved thanks to converging views on some of the pertinent issues, with some issues eventually being resolved. The two major unresolved issues remaining are export taxes and the Most Favoured Nation (MFN) clause. However, a convergence of views was achieved on agricultural and bilateral safeguards, the entry into force of the agreement, market access, rules of origin or RoO and the standstill clause, according to the Namibian Agricultural Union (NAU). “Despite not being resolved during this last round of EPA negotiations, the resolution of many of these issues is interdependent on each other. This means that should one issue be resolved, another would also be resolved. For example, should the issue of agricultural safeguards be resolved, then the bilateral safeguards would also be resolved; and if market access is resolved, so would be the entry into force of the agreement,” the NAU announced last week Friday. Where the EC initially saw no need to include agricultural safeguards in the agreement, during the last round of negotiations it was agreed in principle that such safeguards could be applied to a list of pre-specified products.
Hence the SADC-EPA countries need to compile and submit such a list to the EC for consideration. Should the eventual list be accepted, the issue of bilateral safeguards could also be resolved. Furthermore, the EC has accepted the full South African market-opening offer except for three products, namely butter, hams and shoulders and wheat. Regarding the latter three only the specific details of the market access application still need to be ironed out. Should agreement be reached on the specific applications, the issue of the entry into force of the agreement could also be resolved. In addition, five issues were resolved and concluded, namely, agricultural export subsidies, infant industry protection (IIP), intellectual property rights (IPR), tax governance and transitional safeguards for Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia and Swaziland (the BLNS countries). The chief negotiators of both parties signed off on these resolved issues to prevent a re-opening of the texts during future negotiating rounds.
From the above it can be deduced that a large degree of progress was achieved as compared to the previous rounds of negotiations. Given that both parties are keen to conclude the agreement before the deadline of October 01, 2014, the way forward includes a series of meetings to finalise unresolved issues. The first is an internal SADC-EPA ministerial meeting scheduled for March 28. This is to be followed by a next round of negotiations between the SADC-EPA countries and the EC from March 31 to April 01. Should the latter not result in the desired conclusion of the negotiations, the proposal is for a parallel ministerial meeting during the upcoming European Union (EU)-Africa Summit in Brussels slated for April 2-3. The objective of this parallel meeting is to ensure that any remaining unresolved issues are finalised though political intervention to conclude the negotiations.
By Staff Reporter