Since 2005 there have been two training workshops to equip interested individuals and organisations to prepare for the Economic Partnerships Agreement (EPA) negotiations. As the SADC EPA negotiations are now heading towards the final months, one more workshop is offered.
The main focus will be extraction of data from the TIPS/AusAID Southern African Trade Database, data manipulation and compilation of national lists of sensitive and non-sensitive products from the database. Most of the workshop time will be spent on assessing how changes to national lists would affect the overall regional position.
The workshop is intended to help members of the SADC minus the EPA negotiating group (Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Swaziland, Mozambique, Angola and Tanzania) to fine-tune a coherent, regional defensive strategy in an environment that allows experimentation to take place. Participants can experiment with any changes that they wish to consider to their national defensive list, and see how they affect the proportion of trade that is included/excluded from liberalisation, the proportion of their tariff revenue that may be lost, and how their national defensive list relates to those of their partners.
This workshop is not a formal negotiating session; therefore participants can be as radical or as cautious as they wish to be in trying out variations on current positions. Nothing that is done during the workshop will feed into negotiating positions unless the countries concerned decide that they should do so�� - and the workshop discussions will not be publicised in any way. So although the workshop is "insulated" from the real negotiations, participants will use real trade and tariff data to "simulate" the EPA negotiations.
On behalf of Dr Chris Stevens and the Overseas Development Institute
(ODI), you are invited to participate in this workshop to be held on 22-23 May at the Kopanong Conference Centre in Benoni, Johannesburg.
All costs related to travel and accommodation will be covered.
If you are interested in attending, please contact Talitha Bertelsmann-Scott at talitha@axxess.co.za as soon as possible with your first and last names, title and gender, country of residence, passport number and your travel requirements.
Alternatively contact her at:
Tel: � 84 580 5473
Fax: 086 518 3204