Adapted from: EPDCM – Cotonou Infokit 4 – Innovations in the Cotonou Agreement 1 February 2001 www.eurotreaties.com
The EU’s political prerequisites are accompanied by a wholly new approach to development funding on the part of the EC’s Trade and Development Commissioners:
aid projects accompanied by a plaque commemorating the construction of a school or road by the EU are to be abandoned where the conditions in ACP States permit and where budgeting capacity is acceptable, in favour of large dispensations of funds in budgetary support to the particular country. This means that the EC has insight into the processes by which the ACP country’s budget prioritises poverty alleviation, includes Non-State Actors, advances trade and regional development. Thereby a political tool is used in the dispensing of EU development funds. The EC describes this process as countries “taking ownership” of the development process and running the partnership scheme. As will be seen below, the obstacles to the “ownership” are large and burdensome in some cases although this resolves the absorption conundrum which previously plagued the disbursements of EDF funds.
regional development forms the cornerstone of development in ACP Group–EU relations: henceforth the EU will negotiate Economic Partnership Agreements with regional groupings of the ACP namely four regions of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific; the EC Directorates involved believe that the regional approach (successfully pioneered by Europe) is a lesson for the rest of the donor community and is prepared to synchronise its efforts with other donor countries and organisations and to link ACP countries to non-ACP countries in the region linking them in preparation for “budgetisation” Africa-North Africa, Caribbean-Latin America, Pacific-Asia.
with the liberalisation and the globalisation of trade and the rules of the World Trade Organisation, the EU insists that freer trade is a tool in the alleviation of poverty and the spread of development and the model held up is the development of the European Union itself. This is the source of the Economic Partnership Agreements with the six regions which are to harmonise the trade relations between the ACP countries with the requirements of the World Trade Organisation’s precepts and bias against preferential trade agreements which the ACP Group enjoys with the EU – this despite the fact that each region has members who are LDC’s and therefore enjoy special privileges in terms of either Everything But Arms access to the EU market or LDC rights (See Annex “D”). These states may “opt out” of the Economic Partnership Agreements in terms of the Cotonou Agreement. There are a great number amongst the Membership of the ACP Group (41) as can be seen in Table 6:
TABLE 6: ACP COUNTRIES BY REGION SHOWING LEAST DEVELOPED COUNTRIES*
