Complex spaghetti of free trade pacts gets further entwined

ADDING TO the complexity of Africa’s free-trade community configurations, the East African Community (EAC) has now decided to conduct its economic partnership agreement (EPA) with the European Community (EC) as a separate regional trade bloc. It’s an unexpected twist in the EPA negotiations, according to Paul Kruger, a researcher for the Trade Law Centre for Southern Africa (tralac). “This,” he said, “effectively means that Tanzania must withdraw from the Southern African Development Community (SADC) EPA configuration while Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda have to withdraw from the Common Market for East and Southern Africa (Comesa) EPA configuration.” This proposal, if accepted, could provide a short cut to solving the long-standing argument about overlapping memberships in eastern and southern Africa. Although Tanzania has been marked as a dark horse right since the inception of the SADC EPA negotiations, it continued to bind itself with the SADC despite pressure to rethink its decision. “Comesa was the more logical choice,” Kruger added, “since the EAC has been cooperating with Comesa on the implementation of its integration and liberalisation agenda.” But there would still be an overlap – with Tanzania again the guilty party. The EAC is also a customs union, according to the definition laid down in GATT Art. XXIV: 8 (a)(ii) – which stipulates that the union members shall apply “substantially the same duties and other regulations of commerce”. “If a country wants to remain in two distinct customs unions,” said Kruger, “there must be concerted efforts from the two customs unions to synchronise their external tariff policies. “It is however only a theoretical possibility because in practice it will be unrealistic to apply two different external tariffs.” Making the predicament even more challenging is Comesa being scheduled to become a customs union in 2008, and the SADC in 2010. ”It still remains to be seen if the EAC countries will withdraw from their current configurations,” Kruger added, “and if the EC will accept this proposal at such a late stage.”