conference junkie/ junket #2

The all day seminar I went to this week was at the 4* Sebel hotel (very ugly high-rise, new hotel, on the harbour) and wasn’t directly relevant to my work but was a really interesting event. The title (by which I guess they were trying to put people off coming) was the Regional information seminar on the EU Economic Pacific Partnership Agreement. Vanuatu is one of the 77 ACP (African, Caribbean, Pacific) countries which ‘enjoy’ special trading arrangements with the EU. At the moment these preferential trading arrangements are based on the Cotonou Cooperation Agreement (which took over from the Lome accords if you're up on this kind of thing) and function under a WTO waiver. The WTO waiver expires on the 31st December this year, and the EPAs are the successor to this agreement.

The EPAs raise the bar and suggest a higher level of trade liberalization than these countries have had to face from the EU before. As a result many of the EPAs which have been negotiated for the past 5 years are still to be signed by ACP countries from around the world. Vanuatu is refusing to sign up to the Pacific Region EPA.

It was a really interesting day and not for the first time I wished I had more of a clue about economics as a lot of the discussion went over my head. I think the argument for trade liberalization as the best way forward for sustainable development was not really at issue, the disagreement, with the EU delegation at one end and the Oxfam rep at the other end, is how fast this liberalization is made/ allowed to happen. The main concerns of Vanuatu and other ACP countries are loss of fiscal resources (Vanuatu doesn’t have an income tax but relies on import taxes for massive amounts of its revenue), protection of local businesses and competition from EU countries. The EU representative from the Trade Unit in Brussels was very polished and pretty persuasive as the ‘guy who is just trying to help,’ but the fact that Vanuatu exports very little to the EU (kava or a mat anyone?) and imports 4 times as much as it exports (imports are mainly electronic goods, processed food, cars and clothes etc) from Australia, NZ, China, Japan and the EU makes me think Vanuatu has less to gain from the arrangements than Jacques might think. He made an interesting point about the new make-up of the EU (with all the new eastern bloc accession countries) which meant that the attitude of paternalism and ex-colonial responsibility of countries like the UK, France, Spain etc is being diluted by countries in Eastern Europe not a great deal richer than some of the ACP nations and without the post-colonial guilt.

The whole question is actually irrelevant to Vanuatu at the moment as it is currently classed by the UN as an LDC (least developed country) meaning it gets preferential treatment under LDC rules anyway. This meant the Trade Minster could remark that “no EPA at all would be better than a bad agreement.” True for the time-being but Vanuatu’s status as an LDC is under review because of its growing GDP, some of John’s foreign affairs colleagues were making the case for Vanuatu remaining on the LDC list at the UN last month. If anyone is still reading at this point and has any suggestions on something like a duffer’s guide to global economics that would be great.