Lamy sets out the principles for EPA negotiations
At the opening of the ACP-EU trade negotiations the EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy highlighted four main areas that need to be addressed: improved commitments on market access; ensuring that EPAS become tools for sustainable development by ensuring flexibility in addressing the problems faced by each country and their capacity to adjust to the new trading environment; reinforcement of regional initiatives; ensuring conformity with multilateral trade rules. Commissioner Lamy argued that the EPA negotiations should go beyond WTO commitments. While recognising that ACP governments face constraints on their negotiating capacity he urged that 'this should not be a pretext for slowing down the negotiations'. Comment: While the Commission Press release on the eve of negotiations maintained that the objectives and principles of economic partnership agreements had been settled in the Cotonou Agreement , this neglects the considerable differences in emphasis which exist between the EU and certain ACP governments, not least over the degree of flexibility which WTO rules will allow and the appropriateness of EPAs for all ACP countries. This illustrates a more general point which is that the ACP and the European Commission often use the same words to mean rather different things.
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| Format: | News Item biblioteca |
| Language: | English |
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Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation
2002
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10568/52580 http://agritrade.cta.int/Back-issues/Agriculture-monthly-news-update/2002/November-2002 |
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