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By William Schomberg
Brussels - Europe's trade chief vowed on Monday to keep an end-of-year deadline for African countries to agree new trade deals or face tariffs, dismissing assertions from some African leaders that the continent rejected new pacts.
Peter Mandelson said criticism from the presidents of Senegal and South Africa at a weekend EU-Africa summit belied the fact that Brussels was making progress with its plan for Economic Partnership Agreements with former European colonies in Africa and elsewhere.
"If all of Africa has rejected EPAs, why are we getting people signing?" Mandelson told Reuters as he headed into a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Monday to discuss the talks.
"It's because in some cases they feel reluctantly that they don't have any alternative and don't want their trade disrupted, and in other cases because they see an opportunity."
The EU is pressing the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of former colonies to agree new deals by December 31, when the EU's decades-old preferential trade deals for those countries must be brought into line with World Trade Organisation rules.
For African countries to continue to get tariff-free access to the European Union for their goods, they must also agree to open their markets to European exports.
Referring to the criticism from South Africa's President Thabo Mbeki and Senegal's Abdoulaye Wade, Mandelson said: "Both of them have absolutely nothing to lose."
South Africa already has a bilateral trade deal and Senegal is classed as a Least Developed Country so its exports to the EU qualify under a separate programme for the kind of duty-free, quota-free treatment offered under the new type of agreements.
So far the European Commission has initialled interim deals, covering trade in goods, with 13 African and Indian Ocean countries - out of a total of nearly 50 ACP states in the region - plus Papua New Guinea and Fiji in the Pacific.
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