The Economic Commission for Africa and the African Union jointly organized a retreat for African Ambassadors and Trade Negotiators from the 17 – 18 February in Montreux, Switzerland. The meeting assessed the outcomes of last year’s Hong Kong World Trade Organization ministerial meeting; identified key issues for Africa in the negotiations; and devised a strategy for approaching future negotiations. The strategy is particularly important since the deadline for presenting draft schedules on modalities for future WTO negotiations is April 30.

Key strategies were devised in the following areas under negotiations: development; services; agriculture; and non-agricultural market access (NAMA). ECA was represented by Cornelius Mwalwanda, Halima Noor Abdi, Stephen Karingi and Mustapha Sadni Jallab. Karingi and Sadni Jallab were also discussants in the sessions on agriculture and NAMA respectively.

Regarding development issues, the retreat reaffirmed the importance of combining the different components into one package. Therefore enhanced market access, issue of policy space, concerns regarding preference erosion, and other elements capturing the multidimensional character of development, should be viewed as a package and reflected in the final modalities.

On agriculture negotiations, the market access pillar is seen as a priority in agriculture and the modalities for tariff reduction remain a focus for African countries. The retreat was informed that a new group of six (G-6) with interests in the agriculture negotiations has since been formed. The group includes Australia, Brazil, the European Union (EU), India, Japan and the United States (US). It is currently running simulations to see the implications of the coefficients proposed by the US, EU, and other groups of countries.

The issues of concern in NAMA include tariff binding, non-tariff barriers, tariff peaks and escalation, preference erosion and de-industrialisation. While the NAMA formula may not command much interest today especially for the LDCs, it cannot be ignored especially in as far as it will lead to preference erosion even of the duty free quota free (DFQF).

With respect to services negotiations, an important issue that came out clearly during the retreat is the need for policy space in as far as the domestic regulation is concerned as any erosion of this space could easily make it impossible for the African countries to meet their development objectives. A full report of the meeting will be posted on this website as soon as it is available.