Trade Negotiations Insights • Volume 8 • Number 6 • August 2009

TNI Talks to Daniel Moroka, Botswana’s Minister of Trade and Industry

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TNI: How can an EPA help address the challenges of the global financial crisis?

Moroka: The EPA could contribute to that firstly because developing countries have got duty-free, quota-free access to the European market. Secondly, the development dimensions of the EPA would apply to the interim EPA so that we could improve production.

TNI: Why sign an interim EPA some 18 months after the conclusion of the negotiations? And given the recent progress towards a regional EPA, why does Botswana want to sign an interim EPA at this time, while some others don’t? What is expected from the signed interim EPA?

Moroka: The decision to get into an interim EPA was simply to ensure that there would be uninterrupted flows from the ACP countries into the European market. The waiver, which was granted by the WTO, expired at the end of last December. And in order to forestall any possible challenges from any WTO member, we have initialed an interim EPA in November 2007. Eighteen months later we have to sign it because we are now giving legitimacy to it. We have decided that we will negotiate other aspects of the EPA, services, investments and outstanding issues in parallel.

TNI: In view of the opposition from Angola, Namibia and South Africa, what are the risks that signing an interim EPA disrupts regional integration (SADC and SACU)? What would be the consequences for Botswana?

Moroka: The possible risk could be in the administration of the external tariff of members of SACU. But the EC Commissioner then said, well, what we have to do is to just align the IEPA tariffs with the TDCA tariffs, then you have a common external tariff. So if there is any problem, to me it will be purely administrative. There could only be the issue of rules of origin that could delay it, but the rules of origin do not only apply to us in the SADC EPA group, they apply to all ACP countries. The rules of origin are among those issues that will be negotiated in parallel as we continue with negotiations towards a full EPA. So I do see absolutely no obstruction of regional integration.