Regional Workshop on Trade and Development Opens at ECA
By Andrew Allimadi, Communication Officer, ECA
08 November 2004

A regional workshop on trade and development for parliamentarians, the business community and civil society organizations from Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Ethiopia, has opened at the headquarters of the Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The three-day workshop was organized by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (FES) office in Ethiopia, in collaboration with the Trade and Regional Integration Division (TRID) of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA). The overall objective of the workshop is to provide an opportunity for various stakeholders to review the impact of the international trade relations on development in their respective countries and develop mechanisms for offsetting any negative effects of these agreements.

In his opening remarks to the workshop, Hakim Ben Hammouda, the director of TRID, welcomed all participants to ECA on behalf of K.Y.Amoako, the Executive Secretary of ECA. He told participants that their deliberations would be crucially important as WTO members are currently seeking to inject new life in the Doha round of trade negotiations; and the European Union, Africa’s largest trading partner, is currently negotiating new Economic Partnership Agreements. It was therefore timely to examine the impact of past agreements in order to influence the direction of current negotiations.

In his opening remarks to the meeting, Hartmut Hess, head of the FES office in Ethiopia, noted that Ethiopia has been involved on trading relations with the outside world for several years now. However, the country remains poor and the incidence of poverty has increased in some cases. He therefore challenged the workshop to think critically and tackle the key question of whether Africa should continue on the current development path, or chart a new course independent of relations with the European Union.

The specific objectives of the workshop are to build a foundation for effective and genuine regional cooperation on negotiations leading to international agreements; to share experiences and assess and evaluate the impact of these agreements on development; to encourage dialogue among regional civil society organizations on how to reduce negative impacts of international agreements; and to explore ways of enhancing the role of civil societies in monitoring the implementation of the different international agreements.