Trade deals garner headlines and photo opportunities. The talks leading up to them tend to be rather more mind-numbing, as countries haggle over whether pig bladders should be considered a sensitive product and just how many widgets should be allowed in tariff-free.

Trade talks between rich and poor countries have the added spice of David vs Goliath about them. With Doha apparently comatose once again, attention in Brussels has turned to negotiations with 78 ex-colonies.

The African, Caribbean and Pacific group (ACP) enjoy a quasi-marital relationship with the EU. It is enshrined in a legal document, the Cotonou agreement, and includes privileged access to EU markets. That arouses the jealousy of other poor countries that threw off their colonial yoke earlier, such as Latin America.

They have challenged the cosy arrangements at the World Trade Organisation and won enough battles to force a rewriting of the marriage vows by the end of this year. These will not be trade deals but "economic partnership agreements", a concept dreamed up in the Brussels bureaucracy. It wants to create clones of iteslf, with regional common markets that trade with each other and achieve economies of scale.

Peter Mandelson, the European trade commissioner, wants to cut the apron strings of the ACP and let them grow up. Dependencies on a few commodities with easy access to Europe has not reduced poverty over the last 40 years.

Non-governmental organisations, the true brides of the poor, claim that instead the Commission wants to bash open the door for its own, often subsidised, exports.

But some of the ACP countries can handle themselves. Last week ministers from the Pacific group, made up of 15 island states, seized on an e-mail from a eurocrat that talked of “reprogramming” aid if the EPA was not signed. Addressing the assembled press in Vanuatu they said they would stop talks unless this attempt to link aid to market access was abandoned.

Brussels swiftly denied the charge, claiming reprogramming simply meant redistributing money from plans to implement a common market to other projects in the region. By the weekend a truce was called. Fiji’s Sunday Post reported that Misa Telefoni, Samoa’s deputy prime minister, said his colleagues were satisfied with a letter of explanation from Brussels. However, he resented the implication that they had misread the Commission’s intentions, saying they were educated enough to spot a veiled threat when they were on the receiving end of one.

Some think the Pacific may have been looking for a reason to get upset. It has much less to gain from a deal than the other five regional negotiators. Papua New Guinea, which has the lion’s share of trade with the EU, is so poor it would continue to receive preferential terms. The others are worried that any concessions they give to far-away Brussels would also go to Australia and New Zealand, nearer neighbours.

The Caribbean is set to sign in October. Brussels’ energy will now have to go on agreeing frameworks with the four African regions ahead of an EU-Africa summit in December. Don’t hold your breath for a Pacific deal by December 31.

August 7th, 2007 in Trade | Permalink