Thursday, March 28, 2024

Africa Free Trade Agreement Goes Into Lockdown for 2020

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The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) has become the latest in the many casualties of the devastating coronavirus pandemic which has so far infected over 2.7 million people and killed more than 191 000 globally. In Africa the toll is over 27 000 cases and 1 298 deaths.

The AfCFTA, widely touted as an economic saviour, was signed and ratified in record time and was due to come into effect – i.e. free trading was supposed to start – on 1 July. But that kickoff will probably be postponed until at least 1 January, depending on the severity of the COVID-19 impact on the continent.

The African Union (AU) summit which South Africa was to host on 30 May to encourage trade negotiators to complete their bargaining on tariff reductions, rules of origin and other necessary regulations, will now probably only happen earliest in November or December.

Wamkele Mene, newly elected Secretary-General of the AfCFTA secretariat, said these were the postponements the secretariat had recommended to heads of state who still had to ratify them. But it’s hard to see how they could reject this proposal.

It was impossible to conduct multilateral AfCFTA trade negotiations remotely

The AfCFTA has been put on ice, Mene says, until the coronavirus has been defeated. ‘I think that’s the responsible thing to do. I don’t think it would be appropriate when people are dying to be focused on meeting the 1 July deadline. Instead all governments should be allowed to concentrate their efforts on fighting the pandemic and saving lives at home.’ Trade ministers in particular need to help their own small and medium-sized enterprises survive the pandemic.

There were initial attempts to pursue the negotiations through video conferencing but the trade officials ran into connectivity problems. And Mene says they soon discovered it was impossible to conduct multilateral trade negotiations remotely, not least because of the problem of translating everything into the AU’s four official languages. Read more…

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