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Business Reporter

GOVERNMENT has enacted legislation exempting or prescribing customs and exercise duties applicable to products from 27 European countries under the interim Economic Partnership Agreement with Eastern and Southern Africa states.

The iEPA includes the elimination of duties and quotas for imports from these countries to the EU as well as a gradual liberalisation of European Union exports to these countries with the exception of products considered sensitive. The agreement also covers rules of origin, fisheries, trade defence, development co-operation provisions and mechanisms for settling disputes.

Statutory Instrument 117 of 2016 gazetted last Friday prescribes customs and exercise duties or rates for any other charges to be levied on various products from Europe or members of the European Community.

Members of the European Community include United Kingdom and Northern Ireland, German, France, Spain, Italy, Denmark, Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Sweden, Hungary and Cyprus, Austria, Finland, Belgium, Belarus and Czech Republic.

Members of Eastern and Southern Africa, at this point, are Zimbabwe, Zambia, Madagascar, Seychelles, Mauritius and Union of Comoros. There is a possibility that more ESA states to join.

The legislation, which has already been gazetted, is known as the Customs and Exercise (European Community) and Eastern and Southern Africa States Economic Partnership Agreement (Suspension) (Market Access offer) Regulations of 2016.

There had been concerns that Zimbabwe risked being removed the European Union-Eastern and Southern Africa interim Economic Partnership Agreement as had defaulted on the agreed implementation.

Formal EPA negotiations between the EU and the ESA group were launched in 2004. In August 2009, Madagascar, Mauritius, the Seychelles, and Zimbabwe signed an interim EPA (iEPA) with the EU, and the agreement applied since 2012.

If Zimbabwe had not carried through this agreement, this would result in the withdrawal of benefits by the EU and the country would have fallen under the Generalised Scheme of Preferences (GSP) for trade purposes.

The GSP entails that local companies are obliged to pay duties on exports to the EU, something they are currently not experiencing.

The partnership agreement is a stepping

stone towards a full EPA and remains open to other countries willing to join at a later stage (such as Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Malawi and Sudan).

There is also a clause which would allow ESA countries not willing to make a market access offer, to benefit from the development co-operation and fisheries provisions envisaged earlier.

The original ESA group at the start of the EPA negotiating process also included the Eastern African Community (EAC) states of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda.

However, in 2007 they agreed a separate interim EPA based around the newly formed EAC customs union.