Executive summary

OBJECTIVES OF THE STUDY

The aim of the Study on the Future of the ACP Group is to give form to the oft-times expressed will of the Heads of State and Government of the countries that make up the membership of the ACP Group to render the Group:

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  more cohesive and unified;
  

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  more visible, prominent and relevant in the international concert of nations;
  

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  more efficient in the execution of its core business vis à vis the European Union and in the regional focus of the EU;
  

• 
  more readily adaptable to the new era of globalisation, and
  

• 
  open to new relations with other international organisations, groups and bodies and to other states which can promote the ACP Group members’ interests.
  

The political will of the Heads of State and Government to reach these goals recognises:

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  that the ACP Group has a real and exploitable international persona and is a declared INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION;
  

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  that, till now, the critical mass that the ACP Group has historically achieved has not been brought to proper fruition, and
  

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  that, to protect the interests of this Group, the Members are together going to have to fulfil a different role and this will mean that radical ways of achieving the goals will have to be defined.
  

The Heads of State and Government foresee a lively debate within the Committee of Ambassadors with the data included in this Study at a round-table which will take the PLAN OF ACTION and the Recommendations at the end of this Study as the platform for discussion on the road ahead.

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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
The genesis of this Study on the future of the AFRICAN CARIBBEAN AND PACIFIC GROUP lies in the “Declaration of Nadi” of the Summit of Heads of State and Government issued in Fiji in July 2002.
The call for solidarity, greater visibility, relations with other international groups, streamlining of the core business of the ACP Group and empowering its institutions has been a constant theme of all of the Summits of Heads of State since the ACP’s inception in 1975 and was repeated at the Heads of State Meeting in Mozambique in 2004.
The urgent appeal for action to confirm the ACP Group’s relevance now is at the same time an urgent reminder that the global context in which the ACP Group acts has transformed radically since Lomé I as to be almost the antithesis to the zeitgeist of 1975, and, ironically, a strong affirmation of the inherent dynamism and durability of the ACP Group inside and outside its derivative nature as a creature of the EU.
The confidence which the Heads of State have shown in the relevance of the ACP Group should be followed by an Action Plan to give substance to this trust. This Study makes concrete recommendations in a proposed Action Plan elaborated at the end after the Recommendations.
The ACP Group in its various guises has existed for nigh on fifty years, has not lost a member, has grown to the size of 79 developing countries and is the result of a Treaty between the EU and these States, now called the ACP-EU Cotonou Partnership Agreement. Add to this the 25 members of the European Union with its New Member States and one has the largest North-South grouping in the world – it is unique also inasmuch as:

1. 
   formal contractual recognition is given to it under the Cotonou Agreement
   
2. 
   it has its own Secretariat, structure and supporting organs
   
3. 
   it has status as an inter-governmental (and therefore international) organisation
   
4. 
   it has a wide geographical base and
   
5. 
   has, as Members, the overwhelming number of LDC, land-locked and small island states which in the present global context lends it a moral and persuasive power.
   

There is a realisation throughout that, despite the size and geographic extent of the ACP Group, it has not exploited the power of its critical mass or its moral ascendancy as representative of the majority of the poor nations and needs to wholly reinvent itself to be relevant not only for the EU but in the concert of nations. The ACTION PLAN’s concrete recommendations contain proposals for the continuation and improvement of already initiated actions by the Secretariat and the Secretary General; an analysis of the value of new innovations and how they can impact upon the attainment of the goals set by the Summit of the Heads of State; proposals for the further capacity-building of the service arm of the ACP Group, centrally at Secretariat level, regionally in the six major regions of the ACP Group and nationally through the National Authorising Officer; and, where this will require further resources for the enabling of the authorities concerned, this Study gives pointers as to how the resources can be unlocked. In other words, no problem, defect or weakness will be identified without there being a corresponding proposal for solution or mitigating action, as well as suggestions as to how additional resources might be obtained.

Moreover, ACP-EU relations lay heavy emphasis on “Partnership” and this partnership has evolved right up to the signing of the Cotonou Partnership Agreement in 2000 and its revision in February 2005. The Agreement’s lifespan for its core business of co-ordinating the development envelope, the financial annex and trade preferences (where they can be sustained) is guaranteed until the year 2020 but its patent lop-sided nature in size and power makes the partnership idea hard to sustain. As partners in this venture, the initiatives for better achieving the stated goal of the ACP Group, viz. poverty alleviation, should ideally emanate from both sides of the partnership and should keep the Millennium Development Goals (See Annex “C”) in the forefront of the relationship. In this study, attention is devoted to the improvement of the core business performance of the ACP Group and its regions and members.
The Cotonou Agreement has brought in its wake an overtly political role to the ACP Group and an obligation amongst its members to undertake political actions to reinforce their international duties regarding the respect for human rights, to apply democratic principles, and to insure good governance and transparency. This forms part of the undertaking to regularly engage in “deep political dialogue” in line with Articles 8 and 9 of the Cotonou Agreement.
The developmental sustainability posited by the Cotonou Agreement is made an element of the political environment. Hence development aid is now dependent on political considerations rather than vice versa in the clear and unambiguous wording in Article 10 of the Cotonou Agreement. Moreover, the philosophy of acceptability of political actions being a prerequisite for obtaining European Development Fund grants, is now a fait accompli. This philosophy of politics running parallel to development funding reflects a belief that democracy and growth are linked and is a reaction to the meagre results development aid has till now achieved despite quantitatively large inputs.¹⁴ In Table 1 above, Africa’s declining trade to just over 2% of world trade is accompanied by research which demonstrates that the number of poor people living on less than US$1 per day has doubled in Africa in the last two decades despite matching injections of development aid¹⁵. Over the period from 1975 to the present the amount of funding made available through the EDF has also doubled in real terms.¹⁶ (See Table 9 below).
The founding document of the ACP Group is the Georgetown Agreement which defines the membership, the institutions and the functions of the ACP Group. The heart of the ACP Group’s activities lies in the operation of the Secretariat and the Committee of Ambassadors and their interface in the day-to-day operation of the ACP Group and its negotiation with the European Commission in its various forms. The scope of this Study provides for recommendations on the revision of the Georgetown Agreement, to make the founding document of the ACP Group a solid platform for its new role. A vital element of this study relates to the capacity building of the Secretariat in order to confront the challenges which the proposals for initiatives, broadened activities, improved performance in core business and bringing about heightened solidarity predicate.
The building of capacity requires a cold, hard look at the institutions which give functionality to the ACP Group. Although the institutions have been revised in recent times, the world has evolved so rapidly as to need a reassessment of the efficacy of the structures of the Group – its Summit of Heads of State and Government, its Council of Ministers, the Bureau of the Council of Ministers, its Troika, the Committee of Ambassadors, its Bureau and the ACP Parliamentary Assembly, and equally importantly for expertise, the Organs of the ACP Group, the Centre for the Development of Enterprise (CDE) and the Technical Centre for Agriculture (CTA) a fundamental tool where so many Members have agriculturally based economies. Because the institutional structures have to underpin all of the recommendations and proposals of this study, the revisions to the Georgetown Agreement will feature last here and will include specific draft Articles to be discussed only in the light of the other abovementioned proposals to give the new activities of the Secretariat and other organs of the ACP Group practical application.
This study would not be complete and would not achieve the right perspective without an historic overview of the progress of the ACP Group and the far-reaching changes which have occurred in the global context and in particular in the transformation of the EU and its enlargement and the emergence of other development groupings.¹⁷ Without a clear understanding of why the ACP Group must rapidly adapt, the recommendations will not have the proper resonance. Also, the successes of the ACP Group need to be highlighted in order to create the perspective for future planned and proposed activities. This reflects the questions: What lies in and beyond Europe for the ACP? How can the critical mass built up over decades be put to work for the interests of its members? Which priorities need to be identified? The study commences with this background to illustrate the platform on which a structure adapted to the future can arise.
The function of this Study is to serve as a sounding board for a brainstorming session with the institutional structures of the ACP Group which can lead to informed discussion on the future and the political nature of the ACP Group.

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CHAPTER 2: HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The institutional memory of the ACP Group has a profound influence upon the workings of the Group because of the formative process it records and the teething problems it encountered and overcame with little fanfare but with remarkable success. The memory helps with committee workings. But it is also regarded as an impediment to change and a confirmation of the ACP Group’s inactivity or inertia because it relates to an earlier époque in which the urgent challenges of today did not exist.¹⁸
The ACP Group, in two guises, has existed through five generations of agreements with the EEC and the later EU starting in 1957 and leading to agreements preceding the ACP Group, as it now is called, between the EEC and the AAMS countries which were not constituted as a group or organisation. The agreements (Yaoundé I & II), at origin, aimed at continuing the special relations the ex-colonial powers had with newly independent countries in Africa and the Caribbean and their position was acknowledged as equal and amicable in terms of the EEC’s founding document, the Treaty of Rome, Articles 131 – 136. Interestingly, the original agreements required reciprocal trade preferences for the EEC and the ex-colonies.¹⁹ When the UK joined the EEC, Commonwealth states also came into the sphere of the arrangement with the EEC and a new agreement was signed, the Lomé Convention, which ended the reciprocity of preferences. Tables 2 and 3 show the expanding process:
TABLE 2 : YAOUNDE I CONVENTION MEMBER STATES 1963

Associated African & Malagasy States (AAMS) Member States		European Economic Community (EEC) Original 6 Member States
Benin	Gabon	Belgium
Burundi	Madagascar	France
Burkina Faso	Mali	Germany
Cameroon	Mauritania	Italy
Chad	Niger	Luxembourg
Central African Republic	Rwanda	The Netherlands
Congo (Brazzaville)	Senegal
Congo (DRC)	Somalia
Côte d’Ivoire	Togo