AU rejects "divisive" EU strategy on trade deals

By Pascal Fletcher and Ingrid Melander

LISBON (Reuters) - The European Union, compelled by the World Trade Organisation to reach new trade deals with African nations by Dec. 31, was accused at a rare EU-Africa summit on Saturday of dividing and rushing its African partners.

The African Union's top official, AU Commission Chairman Alpha Oumar Konare, criticised the EU for pushing through the new Economic Partnership Agreements with individual nations or groups of nations, to Africa's disadvantage.

"We must avoid playing certain African regions against each other, or playing the countries of the same region against each other," Konare told more than 70 EU and African leaders.

"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."

Some EU countries worry that poor African countries' exports will face higher import tariffs if they do not agree new deals before Jan. 1. Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said the EU should give more time to the talks.

"The EU approach must be one of goodwill, flexibility and understanding. We do not want any country to find itself worse off as we go into 2008," Ahern told a news conference -- a view echoed by the Netherlands.

EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said the bloc could not ask the WTO for more time to negotiate the new deals, many replacing colonial-era preferential trade arrangements.

WANT MORE TIME

Some African leaders fear the new deals will expose their economies to too much competition and want an extension of the WTO waiver granted in 2000, to give more time for talks.

Mandelson ruled that out.

"There is no question of my going back to the WTO and saying I know that you have given us seven years ... (but) I'm afraid I am simply going to ask you to renew the waiver and let us live in sin for a while longer," he told BBC television.

More developed African countries such as Nigeria, Namibia or Cameroon risk seeing their exports to the EU suffer from higher tariffs from Jan. 1 if they do not sign up to the new EPAs.

Poorer nations face little change as they qualify for an EU programme which would also allow them duty-free, quota-free access to the 27-member bloc, except for sugar and rice.

Konare said EU talks with separate regions and countries harked back to when European powers carved up Africa.

"It is time to bury definitively the colonial past 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.

Brussels has agreed interim EPAs -- covering trade in goods -- with several countries in East Africa, the Indian Ocean region, southern Africa, Ivory Coast and Papua New Guinea and Fiji which are also members of the African, Caribbean and Pacfic group of former European colonies.

EU Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said talks were continuing with individual states during the summit.

EU Aid and Development Commissioner Louis Michel said Brussels was trying to help states that would be hardest hit by higher tariffs if they do not have deals in place after Jan. 1.

EU foreign ministers will discuss on Monday what to do with countries that have not signed EPAs by the start of 2008.