December 31, 2007 constituted the deadline imposed by the World Trade Organization for the Africa-Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) countries to sign Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA’s) with the European Union (EU), or to be subjected to heavy tariffs imposed on their exports to the EU.

In the future the issue of a common visa will be discussed, so that visitors who come to the EAC can visit the five countries with a single document.

“It is up to the ACP countries to decide whether they sign the EPA’s; we cannot force them,” EU commissioner Louis Michel said during the EU-ACP summit held in Kigali late November. He added that no sanctions would be applied to countries that would not sign the agreement.

Yet not everybody agreed with his assessment of the situation. “It does not make sense to attempt to conclude, under the gun and with so little time, agreements that are of such critical importance to poor countries’ development,” Claire Delpeuch from Sciences Po, a political studies institute in Paris, told Inter Press Service (IPS) mid-November.

Talking to Focus during the Kigali summit, Florent Sebban of the European Solidarity towards the Equal Participation of People expressed a similar view. “The EU should not bribe ACP states with aid money so that they sign the EPA’s, and Europe should not teach Africans on what is best for them,” he said.

To sign or not to sign, it is not as simple an issue as Mr. Michel wanted us to believe. The first question, in fact, is whether the 78 ACP countries really did have a choice, as he pretends.

Indeed, prior to January 2008, the EU and the ACP had preferential trade agreements in line with the 2000 Cotonou agreement. Even though these agreements contravened the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) regulations, the global trade watchdog had accepted to temporarily exempt them from its rules.

Yet that waiver expired at the beginning of 2008, and the WTO warned that without EPA’s, the EU-ACP trade would have to abide by its rules, which would result in high tariffs being imposed on goods exported from the ACP to Europe.

According to Christopher Stevens from the Overseas Development Institute in London, as quoted by IPS, this would mean that 22 ACP countries face tariff increases that would affect more than one-quarter of their current exports. A further five (Kenya, Mauritius, Guyana, Nauru, the Seychelles and Tonga) would have over half of their exports hurt. And in the case of Swaziland, Fiji and Belize the proportion would be higher than 75 percent.

So much for Mr. Michel’s definition of “choice”.