Former South African President Thabo Mbeki has slammed the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) which the European Union (EU) has signed with developing countries, because he says they put “featherweights” in the boxing ring with the “heavyweight” EU.

Mbeki said African concerns about the impact of the EPAs on the continent’s industrialisation had not been addressed.

The EPAs are replacing the non-reciprocal trade relationships which the so-called ACP (Africa, Caribbean and Pacific) developing countries have had with the EU since 1970 under the Lomé Agreement. The EPAs, which will instead create reciprocal – but “asymmetric” – free trade, are agreements with seven different regional blocs of ACP countries.

The EU says the change is necessary because the Lomé Agreement – which allows the ACP countries to export many goods into the EU duty-free but does not require them to allow EU imports in duty-free – clashes with the reciprocal free trade rules of the World Trade Organisation.

Last year the EU signed the Southern African Development Community (SADC) EPA with the five members of the Southern African Customs Union (SACU), including South Africa and Mozambique. It should come into effect early next year. It has been hailed by the South African government for giving the country increased access to the lucrative market, especially for agricultural products. It also gives the EU increased access to Southern African markets.

But Mbeki suggested this week that ACP countries were not yet ready for a reciprocal, equal relationship with the EU.

Addressing the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) in Lagos this week, Mbeki said he understood that “all our regions which were involved in the negotiations with the EU on the EPAs have now signed these agreements”.

He recalled that the ACP summit in Gabon in 1997 had adopted the Libreville Declaration which had said: “We draw attention to the inequities of the international economic order and to the continued absence of a level playing field, and hence, the need for special and differential treatment for developing countries in the application of rules and regulations governing international economic transactions.”

At that time the Cotonou Agreement which would introduce the EPAs had not yet been negotiated. But the declaration said the ACP group attached great importance to the critical role of industrialisation in the development of their countries. And so it called on the EU to continue to “maintain non-reciprocal trade preferences and market access in a successor agreement, and maintain the preferential commodity protocols and arrangements.”

However Mbeki, who was in the meeting in Libreville, said he recalled the then EU Commissioner for Development, João de Deus Pinheiro, telling the summit that “the post-colonial period is over!”.

“EU Commissioner Pinheiro said this was because the EU had already developed the view that the preferential treatment which the ACP countries enjoyed under the Lomé Agreement should be replaced by an ACP-EU Free Trade Agreement which would be phased in over a period of ten years,” Mbeki said.

Pinheiro meant that the EU was determined that in the post post-colonial period, as he called it, and after a short transition, the ACP should enter into a system of reciprocal economic relations with the EU, Mbeki said.

“This is what the Economic Partnership Agreements mean.”

He quoted former Caribbean diplomat Sir Ronald Sanders as saying at an EPA conference in July this year that; “‘Reciprocity’, as a principle, has a ring of fairness about it, but that is as between equals. Between factors of unequal strength and capacity, ‘reciprocity’ is more than unfair; it is unjust.

“If you put a heavyweight and a featherweight in a boxing ring, have you staged an equal contest? Is the short-sightedness of this demand for reciprocity, not obvious?…”

And Mbeki quoted MAN President Frank Jacobs as saying the West African EPA would “confine the Nigerian economy to a mere market expansion of the European Union since we cannot operate with Europe on all grounds”.

“It is on these grounds that we believe that Nigeria does not need EPA now until it has been adequately industrialised and is able to trade industrial goods competitively.”

Mbeki said that CONCORD, a European confederation of development NGOs had quoted Dieter Frisch, the 1982 to 1993 Director-General for Development of the European Commission, as having said in 2008: “Historically speaking, no case is known of a country in an embryonic stage of its economic development, which has developed itself through opening up to international competition.

“Development is always initiated… with some protection that could only diminish once and to the extent to which the economy was strong enough to face foreign competition.”

And Mbeki quoted Stephen McDonald, Stephen Lande and Dennis Matanda, writing for the US Wilson Center and Manchester Trade in 2013 that: “The Europeans dangle immediate benefits to a country that is, probably, in need. Despondent, the country, shortsightedly, signs the EPA, allowing Europe to achieve its single-minded objective of leaving a weaker, more disadvantaged and more exploited continent in its wake. Something of this sort started at a Berlin Conference in the 19th Century. But today, Brussels must not set Africa back in time.”

“The conclusion from all this is very clear,” Mbeki said.

“It is that Africa, together with rest of the ACP, has a difficult struggle ahead – the struggle to ensure that the global economy is restructured in a manner which fully recognises and seeks to correct what the Libreville Declaration identified as ‘inequities of the international economic order… and the continued absence of a level playing field’”.