South Africa: Keen to strengthen ties with EU
Briefing reporters in Pretoria on Tuesday ahead of the 6th SA-EU Summit, which takes place on Thursday, Davies said negotiations on the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States would be among the summit's deliberations.
"The European Union Trade Commissioner, Karel de Gucht, has said that the withdrawal of the provisional market access is October next year. Parliament said the deadline would be 2016. We support this rather than 2014," Davies said, citing this as one of the issues that needed to be resolved between parties.
The deadline would not affect South Africa but would affect its neighbours Swaziland, Botswana and Namibia, "and we are concerned about the consequences of any unilateral withdrawal of market access to a bunch of countries which are clearly developing countries, merely because we can't meet an artificially imposed deadline," Davies said.
Xavier Carim, the Department of Trade and Industry's deputy director-general for international trade and economic development, said the deliberations were taking place at a time when there were growing imbalances in global trade.
"We have been making progress in the negotiations. It's been a drawn-out process since 2007. We've made significant progress on a number of fronts, but there are still a number of serious issues that need to be confronted," Carim said.
"The growing concern in the [Southern African Development Community] SADC group is the termination next year. Effectively this will mean that for Botswana, Swaziland and Namibia, they will see massive declines in their exports to the EU and will hold serious socioeconomic consequences for them."
Balancing trade levels
South Africa already has a bilateral Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with the EU called the Trade, Development and Cooperation Agreement (TDCA), whose architecture is premised on the EU granting the country much more access in terms of the tariff regime in manufactured products than in agricultural products.
In terms of the TDCA, South Africa has duty-free access to the European market for about 65% of its agricultural products, and in return for that the country receives more than 90% (from the EU).
Source: allafrica.com