ABSTRACT
Since 2002, the negotiations of Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) between the European Union (EU) and African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries have been slowly moving forward. At the start of 2007 progress towards an agreement seemed to have come to a standstill. Then, in the early Spring of 2007, with less than one year to go before the lapse of the old-style Lomé preferences, the EU offered the negotiating ACP groups full duty-free and quota-free (DFQF) access to the EU market (EC 2007b). This would fully apply from 1 January 2008, as part of signed EPAs. A few weeks earlier, the Commission had made it clear that:
If we fail to put a new system in place we would have to fall back on the only legal alternative which is the EU’s existing Generalized System of Preferences: this is tariff only with less generous access than under Cotonou for many and no economic governance framework.
