Updating Economic Partnership Agreements to Today's Global Challenges

Against the backdrop of the concomitant food, financial and economic, and climatic crises, African countries continue to negotiate the challenging Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with the European Union (EU). While these new agreements have the potential to help African countries accelerate their economic growth and develop more resilient economies, the presence of negotiating deadlocks or a sense of fatigue, raise legitimate questions regarding the structure and content of EPAs. This publication utilises the momentum for reflection generated by these crises to reflect about the way forward for the EPAs. It consists of a collection of essays by senior policy makers and eminent experts. The marked divergences of views expressed reflect the complexity of negotiations and the necessity of adapting EPAs to regional and national circumstances.Despite these differences, however, two messages can be delineated. The first is negative concerns the near universal agreement that EPAs fall short of their developmental potential, that promised improvements have not materialized, regional integration has been largely compromised, and trust has eroded. The second message is positive and it is that actors have not lost hope of turning this situation around, and there is no shortage of creative suggestions as to how the agreements can be improved. The challenge for negotiating parties is to put aside the rocky negotiating process to date, rebuild the trust needed for a true partnership, and with renewed focus, enter into a constructive, realistic, and pragmatic dialogue on how best to update EPAs