After 10 years of negotiations, the Southern African Development Countries (SADC) has initialed an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union, beating an October 1 deadline.

The deal will now grant Botswana and six other member states in the SADC bloc duty and quota free access to the EU market.

The coordinator of the seven SADC-EPA members, Banny Molosiwa revealed this last week at a two day SADC trade and finance and investment meeting held in Gaborone.

“I am pleased to tell you that we have finally reached an agreement on the EPA trade talks, I can assure you there will be no more negotiations as we have converged, agreed and initialed on the 15^th July,” she said.

Molosiwa said after initialing, they agreed with the representatives to take the agreement to their countries to brief them. She expected the responsible minister in Botswana to place the agreement before Cabinet for signature.

“We also have to brief our stakeholders especially the National Committee on Trade Policy, which comprises the private sector, Non Government Organisations to mention a few, as they have been part of these negotiations throughout the whole process,” she added.

Molosiwa said that starting from October every country that has initialed would get free duty and quota access to the European market. The negotiations included five SACU countries; Botswana, Namibia, Lesotho, South Africa and Swaziland and two other SADC countries Angola and Mozambique.

The SADC-EPA was given the third deadline, which was due in October, after missing one that was set by the World Trade Organisation in 2007 and the other one that they set and subsequently missed in June 2013. This led to the EU trade Commissioner, Karel De Gucht visiting Botswana in July last year where he announced trade talks were 95 percent done and would be wrapped up in months.

When quizzed about the delays, Molosiwa said they had different expectations from the countries which hindered the progress as satisfaction was supposed to be achieved by each one of the members.

“You might have noticed that five countries of the SADC-EPA are part of the SACU, meaning that they have the common external tariffs, so they had to brief SACU first before taking the decision which SACU finally approved,” said Molosiwa.

Botswana could have faced a possible collapse in the local beef value chain in October as the EU was going to expire a seven year old market access directive under which 36 Caribbean and Pacific states including Botswana and other SADC countries enjoy duty and quota free access.

Loss of this favourable access would have meant key local exports to the EU such as beef would face intense competition from daunting and more developed rivals such as Brazil.

The two-day workshop was expected to address issues in the finance and trade sector. The focus was operationalisation of the SADC Regional Fund Development and an update on the project preparation and development facility.

The Ministers of Trade meeting was also to cover other issues related to implementation and consolidation of the SADC Free Trade Area (FTA), customs cooperation and trade facilitation matters as well as trade in services negotiations.

Also on the agenda were issues for follow-up under the continental Free Trade Agreement/Boosting Inter-African Trade Initiative (CFTA/BIAT) and the High Level African Trade Committee (HATC) on the African Union.