Trade, aid and anxiety over China could bring the continents closer
together
Claire Provost and Aaron Akinyemi
Saturday December 4 2010
guardian.co.uk
Trade with Africa will be a key component of Europe's future growth,
the European commission president, Jos? Manuel Barroso said this week.
In his opening speech at the Africa-EU summit [http://www.africa-eu-
partnership.org/3rd-africa-eu-summit" title="Africa-EU Summit], he
announced: "We have come to Tripoli with the fascinating long-term
perspective of a Euro-African economic area in mind ? an area which
will provide opportunities for 2.5 billion citizens by 2050."
The Tripoli summit follows the 2007 meeting of European and African
governments, which changed the tone of talks between the continents,
introducing key phrases such as a "partnership of equals" and promises
to move beyond the traditional "donor-recipient relationship".
Then, as now, the EU stressed the future financial dividends of
establishing a strategic political partnership between the continents.
And EU officials made little effort to hide their anxieties over the
growing presence of China in Africa.
"It is in the self-interest of the EU to keep a strategic partnership,
not just for solidarity with Africa," said Barroso this week. "Africa
is going to be a large market. This is an opportunity for Europe to
find sources of growth."
In the runup to the Tripoli talks, a "special Eurobarometer poll
[ec.europa.eu/public_opinion/archives/ebs/ebs_353_en.pdf"
title="Eurobarometer poll]" reported that over three-quarters of
Europeans agree that Africa's strategic importance will either persist
or grow over the next decade.
The German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, stressed: "We want to
be there when this continent develops economically." The Tripoli
Declaration [www.consilium.europa.eu//uedocs/cms_data/docs/pressdata/
EN/foraff/118118.pdf" title="Tripoli Declaration], along with the
second Joint Africa-EU Action Plan, sets out the next two years of
political commitments for the partnership between the two continents.
The EU renewed its commitment to increase aid spending, reaffirming
its pledge to reach the target of 0.7% of gross national income (GNI)
by 2015, and projected that more than ?50bn in aid money would flow to
Africa over the next three years. Europe also pledged to support
Africa in its bid to gain a permanent seat at the UN security council.
Summit talks also focused on the role of trade and the private sector
in securing Africa's development. Barroso, for example, highlighted
trade in energy and clean energy innovations ? including wind and
solar power ? as potentially lucrative sources of development funding,
building on the Africa-EU renewable energy co-operation programme,
launched in Vienna this September.
However, Europe's rosy image of its future in Africa could be
jeopardised by the summit's failure to resolve the elusive trade talks
between the continents. Differences remain on the economic partnership
agreements (EPAs) proposed to replace the current trade arrangements.
The EPAs would institutionalise the EU's call for developing countries
to liberalise their economies and open up their markets to European
goods.
EU officials maintain that their prerogative is to reconsider the way
aid is administered, moving beyond the parameters of traditional aid
policy.
"In some countries the impact of trade, and environment, industrial,
security and migration policies have a far greater impact on
development than all the money you can mobilise," said Sven K?hn von
Burgsdorff, the European commission's acting head of development.
But one of Africa's concerns is that deregulating its markets would
jeopardise budding manufacturing sectors, further locking it into
current trading patterns, where it primarily exports oil and raw
materials and imports petrol and manufactured goods. In contrast to
Europe's trade proposals, Africa is pushing for equal tariff cuts for
both poor and rich African countries, and an extension of duty-free
access to EU markets ? which the EU granted temporarily in 2007.
Libya's leader, Muammar Gaddafi [http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/
muammar-gaddafi" title="Muammar Gaddafi], said the continent needs
trade policies that are based on "mutual interest, not exploitation".
He threatened that if European countries did not hold fast to their
promised "partnership of equals", Africa would turn to other nations ?
China, India, Russia and Latin American nations.
The African Union chair, Jean Ping, said that while the EU still
occupies a privileged position on the continent, "Africa has already
begun to diversify its strategic partners". Ping added that Africa was
becoming increasingly harder to ignore: "The world has today realised
that it will be increasingly difficult, and even impossible, to
continue to systematically overlook an entire continent with 53 of the
192 member states of the UN; a continent on which 1 billion consumers
live, and whose surface area is 10 times the size of Europe as well as
India ... a continent with considerable resources and ... with one of
the largest reservoirs of raw materials on the planet ... which places
it at the centre of the global issues."
guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2010
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