Businessmen point out advantages of EPA-UE

SANTO DOMINGO.- Dominican businessmen say that the agreement (EPA or European Partnership Agreement) signed this past Wednesday with the European Union (EU), that has 480 million consumers, is a positive one and the best deal that the Dominican Republic has signed, even better than the free trade agreement signed with the United States and Central America, called DR-CAFTA.

As an example, the FTA with the European Union completely opens that market to the Dominican Republic, without quotas or tariffs, and with rules that are compatible with the World Trade Organization (WTO), and this is different than the agreement with the United States.

The EPA with the European Union gives judicial security to 50,000 Dominican families that depend on banana, cacao, tobacco and rum production, because new products will go into Europe under conditions that are unprecedented, among which is Dominican sugar that will start arriving in Europe with a first shipment of 30,000 tons in November.

The free zones will be able to use cloth from anywhere to make clothing for the European market, while keeping their tax advantages, but to export a pair of pants to the United States, the cloth has to come from DR-CAFTA countries or from NAFTA nations. According to sources, these "are not necessarily the most efficient cloth producers", and sugar exports are attached to quotas under DR-CAFTA.

In exchange for this opening up, the Caribbean could exclude those products that were sensitive to competition and put off for 25 years the loosening of European imports. The Caribbean nations negotiated new rules on commercial protection, tourism, cultural cooperation, the push for innovation, decent working conditions and fair trade.

Manuel Diez, the president of the Dominican Industrial Association (AIRD) said he felt that one of the advantages of the EPA in relation to the DR-CAFTA was that the impact on national production is much more limited, since the spiny issue of liberalization will come about in 25 years and perhaps not at all, because many of the products were excluded.

For Diez Cabral, the safeguard measures are more flexible for the economies of the area, since they can be extended beyond the period of liberalization agreed upon, and there is no right for the other side to install compensation measures.

The industrial leader did say, however, that DR-CAFTA and the EPA each have contributions and characteristics that are specific to each and each one contributes to the transformations that the country needs. He said that he believed that DR-CAFTA was real leverage in the push for institutional changes in the country.

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