Maghreb News/ Lamine Gh- The European Union is striving to prod Tunisia to embrace a new trade partnership aiming to heave it ono few notches short of full membership status.
But upheavals outside EU’s borders and Tunisia’s democratic transition travail would not ease the path towards a speed conclusion of the accord.
Tunisia started initial negotiations last month almost three years after the EU initially proposed the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) and an EU representative had already suggested rechristening it in face of a critics storm.
Tunisia’s strongest economic growth and relative social prosperity in modern times coincided with the implementation of a trade association agreement with the EU early in the 1990s, according to local statistics and data from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
The more ambitious DCFTA deal would jolt main pillars of the small Mediterranean country’s economy –agriculture and services—into higher levels of added-value output and enhance the nation global competitiveness if the small North African state puts its act together.
It would damp Tunisia’s haunting problems—rife unemployment among university graduates youth and inequality between the relatively rich but thin coastal edge and most countryside poor and remote areas where low-yielding farming is the dominant activity, the deal advocates argue.
« Tunisia believes in economic integration. Integration is engine of economic growth and development, » said Reda Ben Mosbah, the government’s top economic adviser and main negotiator in the DCFA.
« Negotiations will bring about win-win solutions and results for the two sides. We are counting on our European partners to reward Tunisia’s exceptional efforts. We are expecting special proposals from them, » he told a gathering of government officials, experts, representatives of business, farmers and trade unions and civic society activists.
UE’s ambassador Laura Baeza insisted that the EU will not steamroller the deal into Tunisia which is already struggling with jittery public opinion amid uncertainties of its democratic transition and looming menace of Islamic State which is expanding its clout in neighbouring Libya where it runs training camps for Tunisian recruits.
Tunisia had already the dubious distinction with the world highest per capita Jihadists among the Islamic State ranks in Iraq and Syria , according to local and foreign intelligence assessments reported by media at home and abroad.
« We will decide together of the priorities.The approach will be gradual and progressive.It would be assymetric and take into account the sensitvity of agriculture, » Baeza said.
« The DCFTA could be given another name, » she added as if she wanted to underscore EU flexibility, citing what she called allegations about the proposed rade accord and perceptions based on ideology spread on local media, not objective studies and neutral data.
On the side of the Mediterranean sea, a rail of refugees storming Europe pushed by bloody conflicts outside its borders forced the EU to see its European Neighbourhood Policy project launched in 2003 in a new light.
Now the EU neighborhood policy is undergoing a fundamental rethink, with a more modest, flexible and differentiated approach due to be unveiled on Nov. 17.
Some European experts deem the EU’s DCFTA offer unrealistic and is destabilizing for neighbors’ economies, because it requires them to open up their markets to EU competition before they have much to sell to Europe.
Yet EU officials say Ukraine and Georgia, which sealed such deals with Brussels in defiance of Russian ire, should press ahead with them to anchor economic development.
The EU was unable to ward off the forces that are undermining the stability or the democratisation of its surroundings :Russia’s resentment about the demise of the Soviet Union and Moscow’s new fears of the West as well as political upheavals and violent awakening of sectarian divides in the Middle East.
But EU officials now acknowledge that the framework designed to engage and transform the bloc’s neighbors was fraught with flaws from the outset because of mixture of arrogance and naivety.
The EU approach offered too little incentives linked to too many conditions, with intrusive monitoring that authoritarian rulers and local oligarchs from Minsk and Baku to Cairo and Algiers instinctively resisted as a threat to their long-held interests.
« As we look at the situation now, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we are surrounded not by a ‘ring of friends’ – but by a ‘ring of fire’, » former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt said earlier this year in a grim assessment of the EU’s policy to transform its.neighbours to protect is long-term interests.
Tunisia may benefit from the new realism of the EU as its next round of negotiations is due on March next year.
While some Tunisian experts say the EU must wait for Tunisia to stabilise further. Others urge for speeding the negotiations, arguing the country must upgrade its economy with or without the projected deal with the EU;
« Worries about the unknown future is the biggest obstacle ahead of the deal prospects, » farmers’ UTAP union official Massoudi Adel told the gathering on Wednesday at the think-tank Economic and Social Research and Studies Center.
« Agriculture is crucial and vital for the country, » he added,citing the huge gaps between Tunisian farming sector and its future competent agriculture in Europe.
Advocates of the proposed accord underscore the benefits of further liberalisation of trade relations with the EU, by highliting the brighest spots of the more than four decades of economic ties with the European bloc.
« The trade agreement with the EU had broad and deep impact. Tunisia experienced a full change in is economic circumstances beween 1995 and 2010 in ferms of rising income and consumption. » Tunisian employers UTICA group’s offciial Addelaziz Halleb told the meeting organised by the Center in cooperation with the EU mission in Tunis and the Arab African Society for Strategic Studies.
Sceptics of the free trade with EU cite figures to display what the deem as Tunisia’s losses from pursuing close trade with the European bloc as a warning on the fallout of any future agreement.
« The economic growth induced by the free trade agreement with the EU since 1995 was not enough to absorb unemployment and ease development imbalances and gaps between regions, » said economist Janet Ben Adallah.
She estimated that Tunisia had lost 19-24 billion dinars in scrapped tariffs for the 1996-2010 period when the value of its currency shrank from 1.19 euro per dinar to 2.2 euros per dinar while almost half of its manufacturing was erased by the sheer competition.