A Critical Appraisal of the NEPAD Agenda in Light of Africa's Place in the World Trade Regime in an Era of Market Centered Development
Year: 2004
Type: preprint
Abstract: The basic argument made in this paper is that NEPAD adopts a market-centered approach to development primarily financed by flows of western aid and capital. As such, NEPAD falls short of challenging and dismantling the structures sustaining inequality, poverty and hierarchy both within and without the African state that stand in the way of Africa's sustainable development. To address these challenges that NEPAD does not address, I examine the rule structure of trade in agriculture within the WTO. To demonstrate how NEPAD could have arrived at such a strategy, I use cotton as an example to illustrate how through the elimination of huge subsidies given to U.S. and European Union (EU) farmers, would result in benefiting the economies of West and Central Africa much more than the total aid receipts to Africa from the EU and the US. Africa's marginalization in agriculture is crucial since agriculture constitutes Africa's strength and comparative advantage in the global economy. Practices such as subsidies distort and depress the global commodity markets upon which African economies are dependent. These subsidies are inconsistent with both the capitalist vision of market-centered development that industrialized countries and the multilateral economic institutions they control require African economies to adopt, as well as with the rules of the World Trade Organization (WTO). After tracing NEPAD's origins and inspirations, Part One examines three specific weaknesses of the NEPAD. These weaknesses are the manner in which NEPAD un-problematically seems to adopt lock stock and barrel a market-centered view of development; how it fails to engage with the unfairness of rules of international trade inimical to Africa and third, the problems associated with NEPAD's reliance on western aid and capital as the primary elements of its success. Part two illustrates the arguments set forth in Part one by tracing the gap in Kenya's foreign trade policy and praxis of engaging the European Union's, (EU), questionable sanitary and phytosanitary measures to limit Kenya's exports to the EU inconsistently with the rules of the GATT/WTO. This illustrative example demonstrates that the failure of the NEPAD agenda to effectively address the unfairness of the use of trade rules by Africa's trading partners like the EU dovetails with the current trade policy of African governments like Kenya. To that extent therefore, NEPAD is not unusually different from plans of economic recovery and reform prescribed by developed country governments and multilateral institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This in my view is a damning critique of the NEPAD agenda and it beckons its framers to re-examine the spirit of the African Union's forerunner's, the Organization of African Unity, (OAU), Lagos Plan of Action of 1980 especially in so far as the latter plan demonstrated a programmatic effort in terms of addressing the inequities and unfairness of the international economic, trade and commercial environment for African countries.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
Author: James Thuo Gathii
Institution: Loyola University Chicago
Language: English
Subfield: Development
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2337865942