Madam, - Peter Mandelson's defence of the EU's Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with developing countries contains, to use his own words, some "persistent myths" (Opinion & Analysis, September 17th).
Commissioner Mandelson claims that African and other countries "will be able to protect and exclude sensitive products and take advantage of long transition periods" towards full trade liberalisation. In fact, Mr Mandelson must be aware that transitional protection poses a huge challenge to regional co-operation in Africa and elsewhere. Each country would seek to protect different products that would be sensitive to it but not necessarily so to neighbouring countries.
The EU has also sought to negotiate EPAs in a way that damages existing regional integration efforts: for example, Tanzania is negotiating with the EU as part of the Southern African block, thus separating it from its partners - Kenya and Uganda - in the re-emergent East African Community.
As for flexibility regarding the timetable for trade liberalisation, the commission has been consistently recalcitrant on this issue, insisting on a rigid timetable being laid down in advance. A more sensible approach would allow individual countries to schedule their trade reforms according to their own development priorities and plans.
Mr Mandelson says the EU "will provide very substantial technical and financial support" to help implement the EPAs. African and other governments do not see much evidence of new EU cash being made available for this. But they do see substantial evidence of revenues lost through the elimination of trade taxes - losses that are estimated could amount to 20 per cent of total government revenue in Cape Verde and Gambia.
Mr Mandelson says the EU insistence on including items such as investment regulations in the negotiations will make it easier for poor countries to attract investment. But policy towards foreign investment - and on issues such as public procurement, which the EU is also pushing in the negotiations - should be matters for the governments of the countries concerned.
Why should such policies be determined by an outside power? What gives the EU the right to set the economic governance frameworks for other countries, regardless of how firmly it believes the framework it recommends is the correct one?
We all agree with Mr Mandelson about the importance of poor countries breaking out of their dependence on "basic commodity trade". But how will this be advanced by, for example, EU products displacing those from Kenya in the Ugandan market (one likely consequence of the EPAs)?
Mr Mandelson says that "none of the alternatives [ among EU schemes] match the terms of an EPA". Indeed they do not: the EPAs are uniquely negative in terms of their damage to regional co-operation among poor countries, their erosion of poor country government revenues, and their attempt to lock poor countries into very rigid economic policy frameworks. For all of these reasons they should be opposed and rejected. - Yours, etc,
Dr ANDY STOREY,
UCD,
Belfield,
Dublin 4.