Green Paper to spark debate on future of Lomé

Date: 05/09/1996

By Shada Islam

THE battle to revamp the Lomé Convention, the trade and aid agreement linking the European Union to 70 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states, starts in earnest this autumn.

European Commissioner João de Deus Pinheiro will trigger the long-awaited public debate on the future of the 21-year-old Lomé Convention by publishing a Green Paper in October.

Comments will then be sought from EU and ACP governments, the European Parliament, non-governmental organisations, academics and business leaders.

“The Commission's paper will not talk strategy,” says a development expert at the European Commission. “We will be asking questions and setting out options for discussion. The time for decisions will come later.”

The current Lomé agreement, which was renewed in Mauritius in November 1995, is set to expire at the end of 1999. Under the convention's rules, negotiations on its future must open at least 18 months before the pact runs out.

To keep to this calendar, the Commission will ask ACP and EU representatives to give their views on the future of the convention in the first half of 1997. Pinheiro will then draw up a formal negotiating mandate for ministerial approval at the end of 1997. Negotiations will open officially with the ACP group in September 1998.

The Commission says it is going into the difficult debate with a completely open mind. “All sorts of possibilities will be considered,” says an official.

Options range from preserving the status quo to suggestions that the convention should be dismantled and replaced by either regional agreements or individual accords reflecting the specific interests of the 70 ACP nations.

Development experts at the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM) in Maastricht insist that both EU and ACP representatives will need to show “greater creativity” in laying the groundwork for a new partnership.

Old-fashioned appeals for international solidarity will not be enough to remedy the 'aid fatigue' besetting political decision-makers in Europe, warn the experts. Instead, both sides must find a new economic and political basis for their future relationship.

But it will not be easy. “Poor nations are losing their economic significance for us,” says Dieter Frisch, a former Commission director-general for development.

“There is a growing feeling that development policy has not achieved a great deal, especially in the very area where most aid has been directed: Africa. This provides enough of a pretext to cut development aid at a time of budgetary constraints.”

Frisch argues that the spirit of North-South partnership and dialogue engendered by the Lomé Convention are worth preserving. “A tried and tested policy should not be abandoned without thinking through a better policy,” he warns.

The ACP states have not worked out a joint position on the future of the Lomé agreement. But while critical of some aspects of the convention, most ACP representatives insist that the pact should be preserved.

“The Lomé Convention has made a significant contribution to alleviating poverty and providing jobs,” says Lingston Cumberbatch, current 'president' of the ACP group of ambassadors in Brussels. “The Lomé Convention is valued by the ACP.”

Cumberbatch, who is Trinidad and Tobago's ambassador to the EU, recently told a seminar organised by the ECDPM that the 70 ACP states were very worried by Europe's declining interest in development issues, as illustrated during last year's negotiations to renew the Lomé pact.

The EU spent more than nine months trying to come up with a new aid package for the 70 states. Finally, the ACP countries were promised more than 14.7 billion ecu over five years, but only because the funds were linked to an increase in EU spending in Eastern Europe and the southern Mediterranean states.

“We are worried about a reduction in European aid flows,” said Cumberbatch. “What we want to see is a good and effective convention which encourages investments in the ACP states and supports the private sector.”

ACP representatives also say they want a new Lomé Convention which is “user-friendly and non-bureaucratic” and argue the emphasis must be on making sure that ACP and European businessmen use the agreement's provisions to increase their trade and investment links. “The private sector will be the spark for ACP development,” says Senegalese parliamentarian Papa Sene.

But ACP business leaders argue that the convention is much too complex and technically complicated.

As part of their debate on the convention, signatories to the agreement have begun speculating on whether the ACP group should be kept alive beyond 2000. Some argue that their trade and aid goals would be better served if the ACP group was split into smaller regional groupings.

“We have to recognise the need to differentiate between regions,” insists Ramakrisha Sithane, a former finance minister in Mauritius.

The Commission's Green Paper will look closely at the issue of “differentiation”: ie suggestions that instead of working with an unwieldy group of 70 ACP nations, the EU should hammer out separate agreements with ACP regions or even sub-regions.

Professor Sam Asante, a senior regional adviser to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, argues the EU's focus should be on Africa.

“The Caribbean countries are looking to the Latin Americans and to the North Atlantic Free Trade Area and the Pacific nations are involved in the Pacific Rim cooperations efforts,” Asante points out, leaving the EU to pay more attention to the trade and aid needs of Africa.

But, others stress that a break-up of the group would reduce the ACP's political power in Europe.

“If the group did not exist, it would have to be created,” says Cumberbatch. “We have worked very well together. The ACP group has enhanced the negotiating capacity of individual members. Regionalisation would weaken the ACP and increase bureaucracy and costs.”