ISDS Case Map
ECOWAS
The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is urging the European Union (EU) to show real monetary commitment to a proposed development fund for the subregion.
Economic Partnership Agreement negotiations between West Africa and the European Union are in a limbo due to differences over market access, the regional grouping ECOWAS said on Tuesday.
The National Association of Nigerian Traders have voiced concerns over what it calls inflexibility on the part of the European Union in the ongoing negotiations between it and the Economic Community of West Africa States over the Economic Partnership Agreement.
Ghana may be compelled to sign the Economic Partnership Agreement in its current form come October if discussions on the agreements are not finally concluded by ECOWAS.
Dr Cheikh Tidiane Dieye, Trade Programme Co-ordinator for Civil Society Organizations in West Africa, is sure that negotiations would probably continue till January 2010 since both the EU and ECOWAS had not agreed on the percentage of the market they intend to be liberalized.
The European Union and the West African countries have agreed to conclude a regional agreement on trade in goods and development cooperation by October 2009.
Now, Africans are hitting back at Europe
There were strong indications last week that the free trade agreement between Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the European Union may not be signed before its subsisting deadline-June 30th 2009 because of the need to protect the collective regional interest of ECOWAS States.
Forty days to the June 30, 2009 signing of the free trade agreement between the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the European Union (EU), the sub-Saharan bloc has raised fresh issues that need to be resolved before the pact is sealed.
With cross-border price-undercutting, mounting debt and a lack of buyers, many tomato farmers in Ghana's Upper East Region are turning to suicide. Yet with European Union Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) currently being negotiated, West African markets are about to be flooded with heavily subsidised EU products
