ECOWAS has effectively reversed its April 24 declaration of readiness to proceed with negotiations for a regional economic partnership agreement with the European Union (EU).

This declaration would have broken ranks with the rest of the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group whose primary strategic objective is to leverage group unity, solidarity and resources to first collectively address problems of structural imbalances in its relations with the EU, as a substantive goal in itself and then, as the framework for subsequent agreements between ACP regions, such as ECOWAS, and the EU (see ATA no 8).

Economic partnership agreements (EPAs) between ACP regions and the EU will establish free trade areas based on reciprocity between the parties, for example equal and reciprocal access to each other's markets. As of now ACP countries have non-reciprocal preferential access to EU markets for many ACP export products. The Cotonou Agreement provides the basis for restructuring and renegotiating the ACP-EU trade relationship and for its implementation by 2008.

In a series of important pan-ACP and ACP-EU meetings between May 10-17, ECOWAS joined all other ACP regions and countries to affirm that the start of negotiations for EPAs (commonly referred to as 'phase 2' of the negotiations) between ACP regions - such as ECOWAS itself - and the EU is conditional upon attaining formal commitments on issues of common interest to all ACP states as well as on the principles and objectives of the EPA's (phase 1).

These affirmations re-state and reinforce the ACP negotiating mandate and the political coherence necessary to carry it out. Such coherence was gravely threatened by ECOWAS' declaration in April, which was warmly welcomed by the EU as evidence of its correctness in downplaying phase 1 as mere informal consultations, and therefore insistence on moving quickly to substantive EPAs to establish free trade areas with smaller groupings, i.e. regions and countries, within the ACP.

The EU's haste to effectively by-pass phase 1 and move on to phase 2 is at odds with the problems and slow progress that have characterised the Cotonou Agreement negotiations since they were launched on September 27 last year. In the mid-May meetings, various bodies of the ACP identified precisely this attitude of the EU's as the major cause of the problems encountered in the negotiations so far, and as a threat to the development needs of ACP countries and regions.

On May 12, the ACP national and regional authorising officers issued a statement after their 3-day meeting in Brussels that noted "the divergences between the two parties [ACP and EU] in the negotiations on issues relating to Phase 1 thereof and insisted, among other things, that the EPA would not divert resources set aside for development."

Before and after this meeting, on May 10 and 15 respectively, the heads of ACP regional integration organisations, and then the ACP Council of Ministers highlighted the disagreements on the status of the phase 1 negotiations and on the need to comprehensively consider and adequately cater for the additional financial resources that ACP countries need to adjust and re-structure to meet the challenges of a free trade agreement based on reciprocity.

For the ACP, the link between the structure/procedures for negotiations and the content of the negotiations is explicit and of paramount practical import. For example, the EU's downplaying and watering-down the status and outcome of phase 1 also allow it to downplay the question of additional resources. It insists that the existing European Development Fund (EDF) can adequately resource the adjustment costs, hence the ACP concern that 'the EPA would not divert resources set aside for development'.

ACP officials have pointed out that the structure of decision-making on allocations and disbursements, as well as the generally non-transparent and unaccountable EDF regime is already problematic.

They maintain that EDF allocations all too often reflect the EU's, rather than ACP countries priorities. Areas of paramount ACP concern receive paltry allocations. Trade and agriculture sector development receive only 0.1% and 1.1% respectively. In contrast, just this April, the EU unilaterally decided to allocate 1 billion euros - about 7.5% of the total EDF funds - to water infrastructure and services reforms in ACP countries. Analysts and European development NGOs contend that this water fund is aimed at advancing and locking-in the EUs water privatisation agenda - reflected in their requests to developing countries in the GATS process at the WTO - for ACP countries, for which EU multinationals are best placed to profit handsomely.

Thus the dispute about the negotiations procedures goes right to the heart of the manner in which issues of substance receive attention or are shunted into the margins. The EU has combined occasional flexible language with inflexibility, if not imperious intransigence, in its approach to the negotiations procedures. Flexible language has proven a rewarding tactic, enabling the distortion and downplaying of ACP collective and regional difficulties to serve a one-sided agenda in the EU's favour.

How else to explain the EU's celebration of the earlier ECOWAS stance as "a clear sign of its [i.e. ECOWAS'] mature process of regional integration", in the same moment as EU pressure imperilled not just the solidarity of the ACP as a whole but also of ECOWAS itself - and with it ECOWAS' self-defined regional integration programme?

And this - regional integration - is really what is at stake in the ACP-EU Cotonou agreement. Oxfam's Kevin Watkins has recently highlighted the war being waged by the major economic powers, such as the US and the EU, to destroy the chances of genuine multilateralism in international trade. In this war too "precision guided sabotage is the preferred means of destruction".

It remains to be seen whether the ACP engine of unity and solidarity will not yet be destroyed by the EU's single-minded deployment of its vast array of weapons of mass bullying and bribery in its international trade armoury

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