The Second EU-Africa Summit is now underway in Portugal. It has brought together more than 70 leaders from African and European countries. While much attention has been focused on controversies surrounding the crises in Zimbabwe and Darfur, at stake is how to restructure African-European relations, long marred by the history and legacies of colonialism and neo-colonialism, in the context of Africa’s changing position in the world. The articles in this special issue from the African, European, Chinese and American media explore the issues from different vantage points.
Europe Scrambles as China Makes a Move into Region By John Kaninda
WHEN elephants fight, goes the old African saying, it is the grass that suffers most. This could not be more true than in the case of the rivalry pitting Europe against China on African soil, which is set to climax during the European Union (EU)-Africa summit in Lisbon at the weekend.
Africa is going to be the biggest casualty of this new scramble. The summit, the first of its kind to be held since a similar gathering was convened in Cairo in 2000, aims to thrash out a new strategic partnership between Africa and Europe, and is in part an attempt by European powers to make up for their ever-increasing loss of ground in Africa to the more pragmatic, and less politically picky, Chinese.
Europe so far remains Africa's main trading partner, with trade totalling more than € 200bn last year. However, China has been making great strides in Africa's trade arena and the Asian colossus last year leapt into third place with € 43bn . It has also massively stepped up investments.
Both the Chinese and the Europeans have recently intensified their courting of African states with a view to edge each other out in the race to maintain, or strengthen, the levels of their economic presence on the continent .
Last year's China-Africa summit in Beijing, which witnessed the signing of a number of strategic agreements and the waiving of debts African nations owed to China , signalled the will of Chinese authorities to perpetuate their presence on the continent.
The EU responded in the months that followed by making a concerted push to speed up the negotiation and signing of the economic partnership agreements (EPAs) with African countries. The deadline of December 1 seemed to have been set for the signing of the EPAs to take place just in time for the Lisbon summit.
Though the Chinese and Europeans insist they have tailored those partnership agreements to provide for an "equal, win-win" situation, or a partnership that will "mark a rupture with the past", it looks increasingly as if Africa will be on the losing end. Look at the way the EU last week pushed for a draft EPA with the east African region. According to Luis Morago, the head of Oxfam International's EU office, developing nations had been placed under "enormous pressure to sign".
"Despite concerns raised by many, including the IMF, the commission has ignored possible alternatives and insisted on the deadline," Morago was quoted as saying in Kenyan newspaper The East African.
"They have essentially forced the east Africans to choose between guaranteeing markets for their agricultural products today and maintaining a degree of protection to promote industrial growth - which all developed countries have done in the past. This agreement will oblige the east African region to remove 80% of its tariffs on EU goods over 15 years, possibly more quickly, which could lead to unemployment and the loss of vital government revenue that might otherwise be spent on health and education."
The EU itself, however, issued a press release saying that both sides "welcomed the progress made in their discussions", which took place in Brussels two weeks ago.
Its development chief, Louis Michel, said last weekend that it would be "good to remind our African friends that, on most international issues, the best partnership they can have is with Europe".
Most interestingly, a source close to the EPA negotiations between the EU, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Southern African Customs Union (Sacu) told this newspaper that when EU representatives met with SADC and Sacu's member states, they resorted to "bullying" methods to "force" southern African countries sign an interim EPA.
As a result, Namibia and SA pulled out of the process, causing a "split" among Sacu members. "This is very bad for integration efforts at the regional level," the source said.
During the recently held African Diaspora ministerial conference in Midrand, African Union Commission chairman Alpha Oumar Konare said that Africa would reject any attempt at "tutelage" from Europe during the negotiations for a strategic partnership and that it should be good for both continents to speak on equal terms. Looking at the way in which the EPA negotiations took place, and despite European claims to the contrary, this may remain mere wishful thinking.
On the other hand, China has refined its strategy towards Africa and it is paying dividends. Although when it started making forays into the continent in the late 1990s China was content with giving soft loans to African governments to gain access to mineral resources, China has recently stepped up a gear by offering "package deals" - soft loans accompanied by the financing of infrastructure projects.
Subsequently, huge amounts of money have found their way into African coffers without - contrary to European governance practices and standards -- conditionality or questions as to how African leaders would use such manna. This has contributed to making China's money a better alternative to European public development aid.
Sanusha Naidu and Martyn Davies wrote last year in the South African Journal of International Affairs that in 2002, for instance, Sinopec signed a contract for $525m to develop the Zarzaitine oil field in Algeria. In January 2005, China's Eximbank extended a $1bn oil-backed loan to Angola, which was later doubled and increased to $3bn last year for the rebuilding and upgrading of infrastructure destroyed by the civil war.
More recently, China has been negotiating a $5bn loan - some say a $9bn loan - to the Democratic Republic of the Congo in exchange for access to its mining sector in the mineral-rich Katanga province, in the south of that country.
Concentrating solely on these astronomical figures and concluding from them that Africa has benefited from Chinese investments would be a mistake, though, since this hides the fact that they have not translated into tangible gains for the African people in those nations.
In Angola, for instance, a country usually cited as a prime example of how Chinese investments are really changing the face of the continent, the huge flows of Asian money have benefited only the country's president and 10 prominent families, according to an academic source.
Zambia and Congo are other examples of countries where Chinese mining is failing to translate into benefits for the population. Millions are being invested in the revamping of abandoned mining operations but the industry remains hugely extractive, with tons of minerals shipped to China to sustain the growth of its industries. Meanwhile, salaries remain appallingly low, work in the mines is often carried out in stark violation of basic security regulations, and disputes with the Chinese employers are common.
As one Chinese researcher once put it, problems arising in Chinese business activity in Africa are a "mirror of the poor standard of some of China's corporations at home". Meanwhile, the Chinese presence has been accompanied by a flooding of African markets with cheap Chinese-manufactured products priced to make them affordable to the poor African consumer. This kills the existing local manufacturing industry, which is unable to compete with the cheap Chinese imports.
As Naidu and Davies stress, China's foray into Africa's resource sector will intensify in the next 15 years. This poses the question of whether African nations will be able to make the best of it. "Emboldened by resource nationalism, the danger is that these states will shy away from necessary political and economic reform," they write.
"On the back of China-derived revenue, the opportunity for economic diversification and sustainable development exists and may be embraced by Africa's developmental states, but is most likely to be wasted by its predatory regimes."
The worrying thing, though, is that the EU and its promise of a strategic partnership offer no better alternative.
From Business Day (Johannesburg) distributed by AllAfrica.com [1].
EU Jamboree Seeks Fresh Start - But Africa's Leaders Are Looking East By Ian Traynor
Mistrust over trade terms and colonial hangover hard to shift as China moves in
Kings, queens, presidents, prime ministers, eurocrats and countless diplomats from 80 countries will mingle this evening at a sprawling exhibition centre in the east of Lisbon, at the biggest gathering of European and African leaders ever staged.
For the leaders of some of the world's richest and poorest countries, the first EU-Africa summit in seven years is about the future, with talk of fresh starts and new partnerships. But amid the banqueting and the bands, the past will cast a long shadow.
The unequal relationship between the former colonial masters of the old European empires and the descendants of slaves and subjects causes African leaders to bridle and look elsewhere for assistance.
"Africa was holding out a begging bowl. But now it is sought after and not necessarily calling out for our help," said a senior official in Brussels.
Instead it is looking east towards China, which, since the last EU-Africa summit in Cairo in 2000, has organised three such jamborees. Europe is playing catch-up in the race for Africa.
"Africans are full of praise for the Chinese and less happy with how we manage our aid," said an EU official. "We moralise, we talk about human rights, we insist on conditionality."
Europe remains Africa's biggest donor, biggest trade partner, and the biggest market for Africa's exports by some distance. But in the new scramble for Africa's resources that supremacy is being eroded at breakneck speed by Beijing's appetite for African oil and other raw materials, and its conquest of African markets by flooding them with cheap consumer goods, soft loans, and huge infrastructure projects.
Unlike the EU, China's operations in Africa are unburdened by colonial hangovers or strictures about human rights and good governance.
Chinese trade with Africa rose 700% in the 1990s and has quadrupled to around $40bn (£20bn) since 2000, according to Chris Alden of the London School of Economics and Andy Rothman, a China analyst.
That remains a long way behind Europe's current level of two-way trade of more than €200bn ($300bn). But the growth rate since 2000 has been 400% for China and around 50% for Europe.
Alden and Rothman say China has 900 companies active in Africa and 82,000 Chinese workers employed directly in Africa last year, almost double the total a year previously.
The world's second biggest oil consumer, China now gets a third of its oil from Africa, taking two-thirds of Sudan's output and a quarter of Angola's.
"China has adopted an oil-for-aid strategy," said a study from the US Council on Foreign Relations this year. "Beijing aggressively courts the governments of those countries with diplomacy, trade deals, debt forgiveness and aid packages. The strategy is working."
Beijing's trade and investment is growing exponentially in the continent, with some $8bn already delivered or pledged in loans. The World Bank says China is likely to emerge as Africa's biggest lender.
Chinese trade with Africa is tipped to more than double again to $100bn by the end of the decade, still way behind Europe as a whole, but overtaking the US and France to make China Africa's leading national trade partner.
Besides, China's extraordinary success in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the past two decades often appears more exemplary and relevant to the leaders of the world's poorest countries than lectures from wealthy Europeans.
Confronted by these challenges, and under orders from the World Trade Organisation to create a level playing field for all developing economies who trade with the EU, Brussels is rushing to agree new terms of trade with Africa.
Peter Mandelson, the trade commissioner, and Louis Michel, the development commissioner, are trying to conclude new economic partnership agreements (EPAs) with 78 countries in Africa, the Pacific and the Caribbean, including the world's poorest 42 countries, many of them in Africa.
The proposed deals are controversial. The anti-poverty lobby, a coalition of NGOs, and many African officials accuse the EU of neo-colonial bullying and diktat, aiming to open vulnerable African economies to predatory European businesses which will wipe out local industry and agriculture.
But a commission official involved in the negotiations insisted the problem was not European over-investment in Africa, but the acute lack of interest of European businesses in African markets.
"You could say we've done a very bad selling job," admitted another commission source. "If you're being constantly told you're being taken for a ride, [that] you're being had by the Europeans, it makes it hard to negotiate."
Mandelson complained this week that the EPAs "have been misrepresented as a market grab by the EU - almost bizarre given the zero level of interest that EU businesses have shown in these negotiations".
Fighting an uphill battle, Mandelson and Michel have abandoned hopes of concluding the agreements in time and are now concentrating on "interim" trade pacts.
There are ample other disputes and problems clouding Europe's policy options in Africa. Officials in Brussels admit they have no idea how tens of millions of euros for combating HIV/Aids in Africa is spent.
One branch of the European commission is drawing up plans for controlled immigration from Africa to attract the best and the brightest and keep them from going to North America, while another branch is worried about being blamed for an African brain-drain.
Peacekeeping, conflict resolution, human trafficking and climate change are all on this weekend's probably over-ambitious agenda set by the Portuguese, for whom the summit is the pinnacle of their six months chairing the EU and a chance to try to make amends for the uglier aspects of their imperial history in Angola and Mozambique.
"We in the EU tend to be pessimistic about Africa. We think of famine and war. It seems to be a hopeless case. But Africa has changed," said the senior Brussels official. "We need to move from charity to partnership. Europe is caught up in a donor-recipient straitjacket. The begging-bowl approach is no longer acceptable."
From The Guardian [2]
Analysis: Why Europe re-focuses attention on Africa by Zhang Bihon
The Europeans, who once colonized Africa for scores of years, have refocused their attention on Africa in recent years following decades of neglect.
After a seven-year delay, the second EU-Africa Summit is finally to take place in Lisbon on Dec. 8-9, with the Europeans aiming at establishing a special relationship with their former colonies. So why are the Europeans focusing on the continent again?
"STRATEGIC REVOLUTION" ON AFRICA
Louis Michel, European Union (EU) Commissioner for relations with African, Caribbean and Pacific States, said Friday in his "Europe-Africa: the indispensable partnership" speech to a conference organized by the European Policy Center that the EU needed to create its "strategic revolution" on Africa to change the nature of its relationship with Africa.
He proposed a "comprehensive, ambitious and sustainable" new partnership on the basis of a balanced sharing of responsibility between partners with equal rights and duties.
European Commission President Jose Manual Barroso wanted to put Africa as "a priority in our external relations," describing the summit as "not ordinary" and "a new departure in the relations between the two continents."
Barroso urged to "change radically our approaches to each other, moving away from the mere donor-beneficiary relationship to launch a true partnership between Africa and Europe, based on common interests and tackling together global challenges."
Michel echoed Barroso as saying that the summit should be taken as a launch pad for a new era in relationship and "must mark the end of a relationship rooted in conservatism and sometimes in prejudice on both sides and mark the start of a recognition of real opportunities that are at hand for both sides."
REASONS FOR CHANGE
The Europeans have re-discovered the geostrategic significance of Africa in the globalization process as their dependence on energy imports deepens.
As the world is changing under combined influence of the globalization of economy and the "multi-polarization" of power, Africa "is evolving and changing more than many other regions of the world," as Michel put it.
He cited economic, strategic and security, and challenges over power as the three "sets of challenges" that made the change of relationship crucial to Europe.
Globalization of the economy was reflected in the greater than ever determination of the economic powers to access the vast resources of the African continent to pursue their continued economic expansion.
"Africa thus has a pivotal role in the new geopolitics of energy, driven by high demand of oil and gas," as it has a 10 percent of the world's oil reserves and had taken on strategic importance in the race for oil fields and in the diversification of the sources of supply.
Africa has also become a theater of global strategic and security challenges as poverty, terrorism and illegal trafficking prevailed the continent.
Michel said that world powers such as the United States, India and Brazil "have now made Africa the scene of a new 'Great game'" as they were jockeying for position.
"The United States is back in force in Africa as part of its global strategic vision," he pointed out.
CHALLENGES IN BETTERING TIES
"Europe occupies a unique position vis-a-vis Africa by virtue of its geography and by virtue of history which has left us a common multifaceted legacy," Michel said, but the EU and its member states "do not appear to be taking advantage of their unique position."
Michel listed the attitudes of the EU member states, Afro-pessimism in Europe and the attitude of the African side toward the Europeans as the reasons.
He explained that the colonial heritage and the power instinct created a situation where some member states forged strong bilateral links with their African partners, which only "serves to complicate Europe's position as a global partner for Africa."
Afro-pessimism has still prevailed in Europe, "not just in the circles of power, but in public opinion too," according to Michel. Africa continues to be regarded as a "problem" by the Europeans.
African leaders were clear that "Africa is no longer Europe's private domain" and they often criticized Europeans for their overcautious and backward-looking approach.
From Xinhua [3]
Colonial History Looms Heavy Over EU-Africa Summit
Fifty years after Africa began throwing off the yoke of European colonialism, leaders of the continents have found the baggage of history weighing down on efforts to forge a new partnership of equals.
"For almost 500 years the relationship between our two continents has not been a happy one," acknowledged Ghana's President John Kufuor at the start of a landmark summit in Lisbon Saturday designed to banish memories of the master and servant relationship to the colonial history books.
Ghana, a former British colony and slave trading post on the West coast of Africa, was the first African state to gain independence from the European powers exactly half a decade ago -- starting a process which dominoed across the continent in the following three decades.
But if Europe regards what is only the second ever formal gathering of leaders from the two continents as a chance to put the past to one side, many in Africa feel the impact of colonialism is still yet to be fully redressed.
"The continent of Africa has many problems of development ... which have historical causes, in particular colonialism," Morocco's Prime Minister El Fassi Abbas told reporters.
And in a speech on Friday in Lisbon, Libya's leader Moamer Kadhafi said it was time for those who carved up the continent to "compensate the people they colonised and whose riches they plundered".
Europe counters that it is the main donor to Africa, with EU development commissioner Louis Michel saying that "considerable sums" stumped up in the post-colonial era "could still be put to better use".
The records of African countries since independence have differed enormously and there is a growing feeling on the continent that it must assume more responsibility for its development.
But while the head of the African Union Commission, Alpha Oumar Konare, told delegates that the world's poorest continent had had enough of proferring the begging bowl, he reflected a broader wariness of exploitation.
"Believe me, Africa will no longer be an exclusive purview or a land to be conquered," he said.
His comments, while ostensibly aimed at ongoing trade talks with the EU, could also be interpreted as a reference to China's growing influence on the continent.
Beijing has had to bend over backward to assure African governements it has no intention of forging a neo-colonial relationship and its need for natural resources to fuel its economic growth can be a win-win situation for all sides.
The Chinese government has come in for criticism over its willingness to do no-strings-attached business with African governments such as Sudan and Zimbabwe whose leader Robert Mugabe is subject to an EU travel ban.
Mugabe, accused by the West of rigging his 2002 re-election, managed to secure an invitation to this weekend's summit after his fellow southern African heads of state threatened to boycott the gathering in solidarity.
European leaders have dismissed Mugabe's attempts to blame Britain for his country's economic woes with inflation now the highest in the world at nearly 8,000 percent in what was once considered a post-colonial success story.
But the Southern African Development Community (SADC) of mainly former British colonies recently called on London to honour previous commitments to fund land redistribution in Zimbabwe and have denounced Prime Minister Gordon Brown for his "holier than thou" decision to snub the Lisbon get-together.
From IC Publications [4]
European Union, Africa open first summit in 7 years By Ingrid Melander
Leaders from the European Union and Africa met on Saturday to forge a new strategic partnership at their first summit in seven years, marred by unease over the presence of Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe.
Pressured by China's growing investment and influence in Africa, the Europeans aim to agree an ambitious action plan with the world's poorest continent to revitalise trade -- but also to improve cooperation in areas like immigration and peacekeeping.
Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates said history had "thrown down the gauntlet and challenged us to work together to write together a completely new page in the relationship between Europe and Africa."
Even before the summit started, differences over getting new trade deals in place and over the attendance of Mugabe -- accused by the West of ruling like a dictator and wrecking his country's economy -- clouded the atmosphere in Lisbon.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is boycotting the summit because of Mugabe's presence, depriving the weekend meeting of high-level representation from a major former colonial power in Africa. Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek also stayed away.
The issue of Mugabe, seen by many in Africa as an independence hero, has underlined the difficult relationship between Africa and the former colonial powers, some of whom gave up control only a few decades ago.
"The real significance of this summit must be to lay the foundations of a new partnership based on mutual respect," said John Kufuor, president of Ghana and current chairman of the African Union.
He said meetings like this would help to break and move away from a painful past relationship that included slavery, colonial rule and apartheid. "Europe needs Africa as much as Africa needs Europe."
The call for a fresh start comes at a time when many African countries' economies are growing more rapidly than in several decades, thanks to a commodities-fuelled boom.
CHINESE INVESTMENT
Massive investment by China in Africa in recent years, as Beijing secures raw materials to feed its own booming economy, has added to confidence on the continent and prompted concerns in Europe that it is losing out on opportunities.
Some African states welcome Chinese economic involvement partly because it comes without the calls for recognition of human rights that accompany European trade and aid deals.
"We don't want any paternalism," Moroccan President El Fassi Abbas told reporters as he entered the summit.
The last time leaders convened at this high level was in 2000 in Egypt and host Portugal, which holds the rotating EU presidency, has said it was a historic mistake not to have had a high-level dialogue between the EU and Africa since then.
"The very fact it's the first summit in seven years between a re-organised African Union and an enlarged Europe -- that's 90 percent of the achievement," one European diplomat said.
Human rights and aid groups are pressing leaders to talk less and do more to help end festering conflicts like the one in Sudan's western Darfur region, and reduce poverty across Africa.
The UK charity Save the Children said that almost all the two continents' states were failing on past commitments to dedicate a certain level of spending to aid and healthcare.
"Almost five million children under the age of five die each year in sub-Saharan Africa," said Martin Kirk, Save the Children's Head of Campaigns and Advocacy.
"The only way for millions more children to grow up healthy is for all governments to fulfil their promises to increase health funding, so that essential basic healthcare reaches the poorest children in the poorest communities," he added.
African and European leaders are at odds over the EU's insistence that African states sign new Economic Partnership Agreements by December 31 before the expiry of a World Trade Organization waiver of current preferential treatment.
Some African nations have complained they will face too much competition and are being strong-armed into signing new deals.
"We can't be forced into a straitjacket, it doesn't work like that," Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade said in an interview with French television.
From Reuters Africa [5]
Europe, Africa Seek New Relationship at Summit
European and African leaders, at odds for years over issues such as human rights and postcolonial grievances, set out their case Saturday for an unprecedented political and economic partnership between their continents.
But friction over human rights records nagged at their attempt to forge a new alliance as leaders traded criticism, especially over Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe.
Almost all the leaders from the 53-member African Union and the 27-nation European Union, some of them former colonial powers in Africa, met in Portugal's capital for a two-day summit that was their first in seven years. They were due to sign a strategic partnership agreement Sunday.
Ghanian President John Kufuor, who chairs the AU, said in an opening speech that leaders should set aside past history, which included the "abominable" slave trade, European colonization and apartheid.
"For almost 500 years the relationship between our two continents had not been a happy one. It is to correct this historic injustice and inhumanity that this new relationship ... is necessary," Kufuor said.
Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates, whose country holds the EU's rotating presidency, said the talks would be "a summit of equals."
After their first summit in 2000, a planned second meeting three years later was called off when some African nations balked at the EU's refusal to invite Mugabe. His government is subject to EU sanctions, including a travel ban, over its human rights record.
Mugabe, granted a temporary visa, attended the Lisbon summit but made no comment to the media.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown stayed away in protest at Mugabe's presence. Britain and other EU countries have accused Mugabe of economic mismanagement, failure to curb corruption and contempt for democracy.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said "the entire EU is united" in condemning Mugabe's record in power.
"We cannot turn a blind eye when human rights are being trampled," she said.
South African President Thabo Mbeki, who is trying to mediate between Mugabe's party and its main opposition and who threatened to skip the Lisbon talks if Mugabe was not invited, indicated that European meddling was unwelcome.
Mbeki said African leaders were taking steps to ensure rights were respected but said "we are doing this of our own accord ... having drawn the necessary lessons from our own experience."
Darfur was another point of contention. Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir has so far refused to allow non-Africans into a 26,000-strong U.N.-A.U. peacekeeping force planned for Darfur.
EU nations, meanwhile, have failed to come up with the needed military hardware to support the operation.
But the differences appeared unlikely to hold up the new strategy of joint programs aimed at encouraging trade, addressing the problems of climate change and migration, and developing Africa's transport and energy infrastructures.
The EU is eager to lock Africa into a closer relationship that will foster trade between Europe and a continent that is set to become one of the world's big new markets. China has invested heavily in Africa and is challenging Europe's place as the continent's preferred partner.
"We can't waste any more time," Socrates told the summit.
Africa wants greater European support to raise the continent's standard of living. Despite recent economic growth, around 40 percent of people in sub-Saharan Africa still live on less than $1 (70 euro cents) a day.
Kufuor said EU know-how and investment capital can help Africa take its place in the world economy.
"With its vast, untapped resources, Africa is the new business frontier that must be explored," he said.
From International Herald Tribune [6]
Europe and Africa Tangle Over Trade By Vivienne Walt
European Union gatherings typically achieve little by way of concrete action, and there's no reason to expect this weekend's E.U.-Africa summit in Lisbon to be any different. Despite the high-level summit — only the second of its type — and an agenda that includes such urgent challenges as economic development, climate change and illegal immigration, the issue dominating the headlines has been the invitation to Zimbabwe's strongman President Robert Mugabe. That has prompted British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to boycott the event, arguing that Mugabe should have been grounded at home, where he has reduced his citizens to penury and violated their human rights. Not surprisingly, Mugabe, who delights in berating Britain as the source of his country's historic woes, is unfazed. He arrived in Lisbon Thursday night, where the furor over his presence is likely to keep him in the media spotlight.
The real business on the summit's agenda is far less theatrical. The declaration to be signed by E.U. and African officials this weekend, drafted over months of negotiations, is outlined in a bureaucratic document entitled "The E.U.-Africa Strategic Partnership." It envisages a "political partnership of equals" between the two continents to tackle "common global challenges." European officials have been talking up the document in Brussels, saying it is geared to creating the first truly equitable program between the two continents, rather than historic ties based on Africa's desperate need for aid. "We're moving away from the old-fashioned relationship, where we said: 'Here's the money, here you go, now listen to us," one official at the European Commission in Brussels, who asked to remain anonymous, told TIME on Thursday. "Only that way will we break free of the shackles of the relationship that has existed for decades." In an op-ed piece that ran in newspapers across Africa this week, the commission's president, José Manuel Barroso declared: "The time for lessons, moralizing and paternalism is past."
The open-hearted spirit proclaimed by Barroso and others has collided headlong with hard-boiled negotiations, in which African and European officials have been locked for years. At stake are the tariffs that African countries will pay in order to export their goods to Europe. Europe has long exempted its former colonies from customs duties, but that agreement expires on December 31, and the World Trade Organization has declared that after decades of independence, the former colonies should compete on the global market like anyone else. E.U. officials say they want free-trade deals on condition that Africa opens its markets to European goods. "We're up against a ticking clock," said Peter Power, the E.U.'s trade spokesman in Brussels on Thursday — 25 days before the current free-tariff agreements runs out. "Some countries aren't keen to get down to negotiations."
It's not hard to see why. African countries fear that a new deal could cost them billions, and that their markets will be flooded by produce grown by European farmers who receive huge E.U. subsidies to grow mountains of fruit and vegetables on well-fertilized land. Aid officials say Europe's new deal would be disastrous for some African countries. "It is so ironic: The free trade agreement is going to undermine the very program that the summit is supposed to be promoting," Amy Barry, trade spokeswoman for Oxfam, told TIME before leaving for Lisbon Thursday. "You have warm rhetoric about cooperation, and on the other hand you have what is tantamount to coercion and huge pressure on African governments to sign these trade agreements." South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki said this week he would not sign a new E.U. deal unless the terms improved. African exports to Europe soared between 2000 and 2006, from 85 billion euros ($124 billion) to 126 billion euros ($184 billion), according to E.U. statistics published Thursday. And Europe is increasingly focused on African oil and gas exports; the continent's biggest exporters to the E.U. were energy-rich Algeria and Libya.
But the key player affecting Africa's dealings with Europe won't even be present in Lisbon this weekend — China is rapidly supplanting Europe as the key economic partner for many African countries, as Beijing's rampant appetite for energy and raw materials prompts it to commit billions of dollars to investment in Africa. The Chinese government estimates that its Africa trade could hit $100 billion by 2010. And trade is only part of the picture: China has built roads, power plants and telecommunications towers, and railroads, in exchange for oil. And Beijing has paid little heed to Western political concerns as it cements relationships with leaders shunned by the United States and Europe, such as Mugabe and Sudan's President Omar el-Bashir.
And the Chinese alternative has given African governments far greater clout in trade negotiations with Europe, admit E.U. officials. Still, they say they will not bend their principles. "We will not enter into a competition with China," Amadeu Altafaj, a European Commission spokesman, told TIME on Thursday. "At the end of the day it is up to them to decide who they want ties with. We won't lower our political and human-rights standards." And so, Lisbon will be dominated by symbolic conversations, while the sharp-elbowed trade talks continue behind closed doors at meetings across Europe and Africa.
From Time [7]
AU Rejects "Divisive" EU Strategy on Trade Deals By Pascal Fletcher
The African Union's top official said on Saturday the EU's strategy of pressing individual African regions and states to sign new trade deals was divisive and would hurt the continent's rural poor and its industry.
In a speech at the opening of a summit of European and African leaders in Lisbon, the chairman of the AU Commission, Alpha Oumar Konare, attacked the EU's forceful campaign to clinch new trade and development deals with former colonies.
Most governments on the world's poorest continent have resisted EU pressure to sign new Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA) by December 31, when a World Trade Organisation waiver allowing preferential treatment for developing countries' exports expires.
But EU trade officials have persuaded some African regional sub-groups and individual countries to sign initial interim trade deals, and talks have started with large regional groups, with the EU saying it wants to promote regional integration.
Some developing countries and anti-poverty campaigners accuse Brussels of arm-twisting poor states into agreements that could open up weak economies to destructive competition.
Konare said that for the African Union, "Africa is one and indivisible" and that European efforts to negotiate with separate regions and states harked back to the past when colonial powers carved up the continent between them.
"We must avoid playing certain African regions against each other, or playing the countries of the same region against each other," he told more than 70 European and African heads of state in Lisbon.
"Otherwise it will no doubt be possible to push through a victory of sorts, but it will be a Pyrrhic victory, based on divisions at a tremendous cost to the rural African population and to African industry," he added.
"BURY COLONIAL PAST"
Brussels has initialled -- prior to formally signing -- interim trade agreements with the East Africa Community trading bloc, some Indian Ocean African states, several countries in southern Africa and Ivory Coast in West Africa.
EU Commision President Jose Manuel Barroso said EU officials were continuing talks with individual African states during the Lisbon summit. These are believed to include Ghana and Cameroon.
But Africa's major economic powerhouses, South Africa and Nigeria, have been holding out against signing EPAs.
EU Aid and Development Commissioner Louis Michel denied Europe's aim was to divide Africa. He told reporters EU trade negotiators were trying to help states that would be hardest hit by tariffs after the end of the year if no deal is in place.
But Konare insisted speeding up the trade negotiations would bring no benefit to Africa and called for a new strategic partnership in which both continents would gain.
"It is time to bury definitively the colonial pact based on slavery and trading posts. We can no longer be merely exporters of raw materials, we can no longer accept being solely an import market for finished products," he said.
Konare noted that, as the EU continued to press Africa to sign EPAs, the continent was increasingly engaging with other international partners, such as China, India and Latin America.
From Reuters Africa [8]