THE EU's special development-aid treaty - the Lome Convention - with the 70 African, Caribbean and Pacific developing countries is due to expire in the year 2002. Last month, MEPs and delegates from the countries concerned examined prospects for reform, at the 25th meeting of the Joint Assembly held in Lome, the capital of Togo.
The joint co-chairman of the Assembly, Lord Plumb (EPP) lamented the fact that, as he put it, after 22 years of development aid under Lome the results were meagre. There was precious little to show for it, and there was no reason for complacency. In fact it could be argued that living conditions in the poorest countries had declined: some three billion people on the planet daily face the grind of living on under $2 a day, and 150 million children have no opportunity of going to school. Of the poorest 50 countries in the world, some 41 are ACP states. Yet the pressure to provide economic assistance on Europe's borders with Eastern Europe brings fears amongst the ACP states that their cause will be neglected.
And with "regionalisation" and "differentiation" the new buzz words, the ACP states are worried that a new EU approach, based on categorising aid and trade relations according to the degree of poverty in the developing countries, and adopting a regional approach to the different continents, will undermine the position of the ACP states. There are further fears that the push for free trade, and rulings from the WTO for instance against advantageous arrangements for Caribbean banana growers, will only further undermine special preferential measures for other products.