Economic Partnership Agreements
Even as they attempt to defend themselves from the free trade agenda in the dying stages of the WTO, many of the world's poorest countries are facing an even graver threat through bilateral free trade agreements with the European Union.
Economic Partnership Agreements are some of the first of these deals, involving 76 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries that are home to 750 million people, including many of the poorest in the world. The EU says that the deals will them to develop, but in reality EPAs are designed to open up new markets to EU exports and will expose small-scale producers to overwhelming competition from the world's most powerful multinationals. As a result of this competition, even the European Commission's own impact assessment has predicted that EPAs could lead to the collapse of the manufacturing sector in West Africa.
Similar predictions have been made regarding the impact of EPAs on small-scale producers in East Africa and the Caribbean. Yet the UK and its EU partners continue to press for EPAs which will open up more than 80% of the markets of the African, Caribbean and Pacific countries, the majority within just a few years. European countries took hundreds of years to do this.
On top of this, the EU is hoping to use EPAs to force these same countries to accept damaging new agreements on investment, competition policy and government procurement - precisely the issues which caused the collapse of the WTO's Cancún Ministerial and which developing countries managed to remove from the WTO's programme 2004.
