The leadership of Organised Labour on Thursday asked the government of Ghana and all heads of ECOWAS states to resist the EU pressures and manipulation to sign the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) by the close of December this year. The leadership said they were convinced that the Agreement carried far-reaching negative implications for domestic production, local business and employment and therefore constituted a threat to national development. Mr. Kwasi Adu-Amankwah, Secretary-General of the Trades Union Congress at a press conference on Thursday, stressed the urgent need for the leadership of West African countries to realize that the EPA would only open the doors wide to the unmitigated competition of European service providers without stimulating economic growth for the benefit of the Sub-region. He called on all civil society groups and the entire population to join in the campaign to stop the signing of the EPA. Mr Adu-Amankwah said the leadership of organised labour had discussed the main issues of the EPA negotiations with particular reference to market access in goods, service liberalisation and trade-related issues, as well as the negotiation process itself and had concluded that the current efforts to negotiate a free and fair trade agreement between the world's single most powerful economic bloc and weaker economies was impossible. He presented various arguments to back the call for an immediate abortion of the agreement, saying the demand for market access would result in an influx of a wide range of subsidised goods from EU countries, which would depress West African markets. "The removal of tariff barriers (custom duties) would deny West African governments the most reliable source of revenue and weaken further, the ability of the States to meet their obligations to provide social services." "The hundred percent EU market access offer is meaningless to West African economies in the sense that it has historically maintained and even raised several non-tariff barriers including Sanitary and Phyto-Sanitary standards (SPS) and complicated rules of origin and the West African economies are yet to overcome their multiplicity of supply side constraints," he said. Mr. Adu-Amankwah said labour has also observed that the exclusion of some mere twenty percent sensitive products from the tariff removal schedule was problematic, saying it was a complex process at both national and sub-regional levels. He said the agreement failed to consider tariffs as an instrument of development for stimulating growth in desired sectors and that could create tensions within a sub-regional integration process, which was now negotiating common external tariff and harmonised sectoral development strategies. He said labour decried the attempt by the EU to blackmail the West African governments and negotiators with aid and urged them to be conscious of the clever strategies geared towards coaxing them to sign the agreement, which clearly indicated positive gains in their favour. Dr. Yao Graham, Co-ordinator, Third World Network-Africa, backed the arguments, stressing that West African States were not obliged to negotiate the liberalisation of services with the EU, as the current rules on services between the two parties were already consistent, compliant and compatible with the rule of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). He said the leadership of OL again underscored the fact that the EU was cleverly seeking to negotiate government procurement into the EPA to enable EU suppliers to out-bid the local suppliers and further bleed the ailing West African economies of much needed resources. "What is more, by negotiating procurement into the EPA agreement, the EU would be depriving the West African Governments of one of the most important tools for productive sector development, a tool that had been used successfully throughout the development history to build and nurture infant industries," he said. Mr. Graham said the leadership of OL is totally convinced that the EPA was not the way to development and poverty reduction and that it was tantamount to re-colonisation. Source: GNA