Bumpy Road to Lome III
Ben Mensah
Ben Mensah recently participated in an EEC/ACP seminar in Brussels under the sponsorship of the English Speaking Union of the Commonwealth. In the following report he analyses the options before the ACP countries in their negotiations with EEC for a Third Lome Convention.The bumpy negotiations between the European community and its African, Caribbean and Pacific partners will not be eased in any way by the Europeans insistence that the third phase of the Lome Convention should be tied to the principles set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Lome Convention, a successor pact to the first and second Yaounde conventions, provides a wider framework for the regulation of the social and economic activities of the European Community with the developing nations of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP). It derives its name from the capital city of Togo where the convention was first signed in April 1976. Lome II also signed in October 1979 has virtually run its five year course and Lome III is expected to be concluded before the end of the year and be effective as from February 1985.
ASSISTANCE
As a particpant in a recent EEC/ ACP seminar organised in Brussels for nationals of developing countries with the English-speaking union of the commonwealth, I was not in doubt also about the community's determination to ensure that financial assistance is given to those ACP governments that are committed to free trade.According to one official this shift in the community's position has been necessitated by European public opinion which is constantly condemning the assistance that is given to Third World governments that do not trade with the EEC.
This official who stressed that Europe must trade to survive and have access to raw materials and markets in the developing countries regretted that any time there had been a change of government in these areas, Europe's sources of trade were cut or tampered with. This problem, coupled with the inability of ACP countries to raise their production capacity, has resulted in a downfall of imports into Europe from twenty five to seventeen per cent.
Technical aid in industry and agriculture
In the process Europe has not only lost out to its competitors in the US, Russia and Japan but has also been compelled to import from other developing countries under less liberal regimes.But how will Europe enforce this new policy when it is at the same time committed to giving aid to the developing countries? The Europeans recognize that one of the major problems of our time is the division of the peoples of the world into economically developed and developing nations. There are 1,000 million inhabitants in the first group and about 2,500 million in the second group. By the end of the century, at the present rate of growth there will be about 1,300 million in the first group as against 5,000 million in the second. Again, the developed nations account for more than four-fifths of the world's total production and more than 90 per cent of its industrial output.
EXPLOSION
Given this difference, the gross national product per head ranges from $100 a person per year at the lower end of the scale and more than $3,500 at the top. The average is $500, above which a few live in luxury and below that a huge number face starvation, malnutrition, illiteracy and early death.A commission set up by the World Bank under the chairmanship of Lester Pearson, the former Canadian Prime Minister, re-affirmed that the world had become a village unified by necessity. If developed nations were to ignore this, they would one day find the rage of the hungry directed against them.
Will the EEC, threatening to impose political conditions for its financial assistance to the ACP countries, be able to force change on Africa. How can the Europeans expect the developing countries to comply with the convention on human rights when their trading partner persists in its inhuman policy of apartheid?
But again as another official of the EEC pointed out, "trade negotiations are carried out within the framework of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), and to the extent that a country is a member of the agreement is treated like any other member. South Africa is in the same category as the United States, Japan etc and unless a political decision is taken South Africa will be treated likewise by the European Commission.
"Moreover South Africa plays an important role in the international trade in the sense that together with the USSR are the only countries that produce certain minerals such as uranium, diamond and copper.
The obvious conclusion is, since the West is not ready to depend on the Russians for supplies, any requests for sanctions against South Africa will be resisted.
This is the stark picture facing the ACP countries who can also not expect to get any definitive assurances from the European community for new methods of evolving prices for their commodities under a new economic order.
INSTABILITY
All that the community can offer is the STABEX system which has the aim of remedying the harmful effects of the instability of export earnings and to guarantee the stabilization of earnings derived from ACP states' exports to the community of products on which their economies are dependent and which are affected by fluctuations in price or quantity or both.In practice, if an ACP state records a drop in its earnings from exports to the community of a given product on the list of products covered by stabex, it will address to the commission a request for the transfer of an amount, equal to the difference between the earnings from exports of this product to the community for the year in question and a reference level calculated on the basis of the corresponding earnings for the preceding four years.
This is an insurance policy that has been necessitated by the fact that the EEC, as one of several economic blocs that trade with the developing countries, cannot alone negotiate with the ACP partners a modicum for the fixing of prices for commodities. It is an issue that requires a global consensus, a forlorn requirement!
DEPENDENCE
These are the cards on the table to be juggled with by the ACP delegates in their negotiations with their EEC coun- terparts towards Lome III.While they are not the best of cards to play a serious game with the position of the ACP countries is weakened fur- ther by the fact that they have nothing positive to show for the little help that was doled out to them in the past not only by the EEC, but also U.S.A., Japan, Canada, USSR etc.
It was pathetic listening to the Perhaps a realisation of this Secretary General of the ACP secretariat in Brussels recounting the problems, among which was bureaucratic ineptitude, preventing ACP countries from utilising what has been made available to them in the past under Yaounde I and II and then Lome I and II for the benefit of their own people.
In the past ten years the per capita incomes in the poorest African countries have fallen by 0.4% a year. In 1980, 750 million people, a third of the Third World's population, were living or rather existing in absolute poverty. Today millions of people are starving.
FUTURE
The future is bleak as the developing countries' overall dependence on food imports is increasing. Grain imports had risen from 25 million tonnes gross at the beginning of the 1960s to 80 million tonnes by 1978-79 and look set to top 200 million tonnes by the year 2000. Many countries are already having to choose between food and oil imports.In this state of affairs, a few well fed and clothed ministers and other government officials can no longer fly to European capitals to scream that the Europeans still owe us a living.
After nearly a quarter century of political independence a yawning gap has opened up between the developing countries. Some are classified as middle-income countries while others are still tagged poorest nations. Does this not indicate that some of our problems lie with us rather than solely with the EEC partners?
Perhaps a realisation of this weakness will help us to negotiate something meaningful with the EEC under Lome III.
