According to press reports the COMESA Secretariat is concerned about the implications of sub-groups of COMESA countries signing different interim EPAs. In this context it is demanding ‘an urgent review of the interim pacts to forestall a possible fall out among member states’. This followed a recent meeting of COMESA’s regional negotiating forum (RNF) which described the situation as ‘grim’, with the interim EPAs being seen as ‘potentially dangerous to Africa’s regional-integration agenda’. At the Lusaka COMESA RNF meeting it was agreed that the ‘ESA should consider ways of preserving its regional-integration objectives by ensuring coordination and harmonisation of negotiations with SADC and EAC groupings’. There is concern to exclude from the final agreement ‘certain clauses that are deemed to work against regional-integration efforts in Africa’. According to press reports the COMESA secretary-general Erastus Mwencha was concerned that although interim deals had helped countries like Kenya ‘they had failed to address the critical aspects of development and instead driven wedges among African states’. He described the development component of the EPAs as ‘very weak’ asserting ‘everybody is not happy with what came out from the Brussels talks’. He argued that the EC was ‘not willing to talk of extras on development and instead cites the EDF which has always been in existence. There is nothing new … this is why we need to take hard decisions now and not wait to regret later’.

Meanwhile the head of the ‘Development through trade’ programme of the South African Institute of International Affairs, argues that ‘the most enduring legacy of IEPAs is likely to be the potentially fatal blow they have dealt to feeble regional economic-integration efforts in Africa’. According to Draper ‘with the exception of the EAC, which signed as a bloc, every other regional grouping in the sub-continent fractured … this happened because the regional groupings included both LDCs and non-LDCs, and the EU differentiated between these two categories’.

In response to concerns over the implications of multiple EPAs for regional integration efforts ‘East Africa’s trade ministers have proposed the formation of a larger trading bloc’, namely ‘the formation of a grand free-trade area consisting of the COMESA and SADC’. This it is felt would be in line with the recent AU resolution which called for continent-wide cooperation in matters of trade and development. However Kenya reportedly ‘expressed reservations over the grand FTA proposal, citing the threat that South Africa’s larger economy could pose to it’.