“Can we sell more olive oil in Europe? Can we mention that it is a product coming from Tunisia? Would it be possible to postpone the next negotiation meeting? What guarantees do we have that our business owners and investors will be allowed on the European territory?” 

These few questions may seem simplistic, and obviously caricatural… but they eventually sum up, in a nutshell, the Tunisian negotiators discourse. 

Swapping dates, oranges and olive oil for Euros, but what is the counterpart? Where will the thousand tons of wheat consumed by Tunisian households in the form of subsidized baguettes and flour come from? What should the agricultural sector serve for? feed the local population or increase the foreign currency reserves? Should the right to healthcare take precedence over the intellectual property rights and the profits they generate for pharmaceutical companies?
These fundamental questions do not seem to be part of the Tunisian negotiators’ preoccupations. Is this an exaggerated statement? Perhaps. 

At the risk of recalling the obvious, the European Union is Tunisia’s first trade partner. But the EU is by no means a charity organization. It is an economic and political entity, one of the most powerful in the world, which position is being threatened by the USA and China. 

It is both predictable and legitimate that the EU defends its economic interests and its sphere of political influence in the region. And it should be the same for Tunisia. Interests of these actors can converge… but they can diverge as well.

It is not a question of discussing the modalities and extent of deeper free trade with the EU, but of assessing the balance of power and the impact of each article, each paragraph of this agreement on the lives of citizens, but also of the Tunisian State. As Ignacio Garcio Bercero, chief negotiator of the EU, states, Tunisia represents only 0.5% of the European market, while the European market represents more than 70% of Tunisian exports.

Why taking as much interest in Tunisia, then? Why didn’t the negotiation take place at a the Maghreb scale in order to reduce the lack of proportion between the negotiating parties? Indeed, Tunisia is in a relationship of economic and political dependence on the EU. Would Tunisia be able to re-balance or even… better negotiate its dependence? 

The EU and Tunisia are bound by an association agreement since 1995. What conclusion can we draw from it? The evaluation on Tunisia’s part is dragging. The terms of reference used to choose a consulting cabinet were published in January 2017. Selected at the end of 2018, it is barely starting its work just as this article is being written. Our requests to access information about the final interim reports remain unanswered. 

In this series of article about DCFTA, we will first address the ongoing negotiations, happening in the dark. They are the fruit of an investigation led by Fadil Aliriza after a conference by the Tunisian Forum on Economic and Social Rights (FTDES) held in October 2018.

Thereafter, we will concentrate on the topics of food security and sovereignty. The third article will focus on the fragile balance between the right to life and health and the right to intellectual property, a balance which might be challenged by the DCFTA. 

Our demands since October 2018 to meet the Tunisian chief negotiator, Hichem Ben Ahmed, currently Minister of Transport remained fruitless. His European counterpart, Ignacio Garcio Bercero, chose to answer our questions by email. 

Finally, the critical perspective is raised to us by Maha Ben Gadha, head of the economic programs at the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation – North Africa. Beyond these articles, our media, Barr al Aman, will produce meetings and Facebook lives to assess these embryonic public policies.  

Let us imagine a private, parallel and transnational justice to defend the interests of investors considered “not enough protected” by Tunisian laws. Let us imagine medicines whose production and marketing were prohibited because of extensions in protection periods, additional to those originally planned by the patent. 

Let us imagine calibrated, certified, imported and European-norm-compliant potatoes in our supermarkets. Let us imagine an adaptation of our job market to European expectations…

The Deep Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement (DCFTA) proposed to Tunisia by the EU certainly has an advantage: it questions us about who we are, and what we want to be.

Translated by An Hoang-Xuan

A new trade agreement between Tunisia and the European Union is at work and is raising crucial questions. The consequences on Tunisian sovereignty, its agricultural sector and its access to medicines might be at the core of this agreement. 

With over six years of discussion, two years of formal negotiations, 2019 – the deadline set by the European Union in order to adopt the DCFTA or Deep Comprehensive Free Trade Agreement – is now right around the corner. And yet, at the dawn of such a decision, it seems that the Tunisians are utterly unaware of the very content of the agreement. 

The issue is “sensitive”, according to a civil servant working at the Tunisian Minister of Investment and International Cooperation who suggested the journalists should consult the website “ALECA.tn” in order to get more substantial information on the matter.

It is a website with an official-like appearance, proudly displaying the European and the Tunisian flags with the motto “for a real partnership and a better integration of Tunisia within the global economy”. 

The Tunisian presidency is the domain name’s holder. However, no mention is made of the sources of funding for such a tool. No information sheet of the different topics being negotiated is available in Arabic, although they are partly so in English and completely so in French. 

The DCFTA’s topics

• Trade of agricultural and fishery products
• Sanitary and phytosanitary rules (SPS)
• Technical barriers to trade (TBT)
• Trade and sustainable development 
• Trade and investment in services 
• Investment jurisdictional system and dispute settlement 
• The protection of intellectual property
• Trade protection measures
• Public procurement
• Rules on Competition and State’s support
• Custom procedures
• Transparency rules
• Small and medium-sized businesses
• The measures related to trade in energy and raw materials

Source : Article “Les domaines concernés par l’ALECA” (01/01/2019)

A difficult access to information

In early October, the Tunisian Forum on Economic and Social Rights (FTDES) organized a two-day international conference on the DCFTA in Tunis. 

The organizers declared that the event was created, so as to connect people working in sectors that will be affected by the trade agreement.  The goal was to contextualize this agreement and, ultimately, to constitute a group of specialists capable of articulating an informed criticism regarding the DCFTA, in its current form. 

As the conference was running, the FTDES published a document analysing the DCFTA and exposing the perception of Tunisian experts, mostly from civil society and unions. Yet, among these specialists of the Tunisian key economic sectors, there was a tremendous lack of knowledge about the content. For instance, among the 13 experts interrogated in the document, only one knew the DCFTA’s mechanism for dispute settlements, whereas it allows the foreign investors to sue the Tunisian state more easily. 

The FTDES’ report observed that “none of the interviewed persons considers that they have an important influence on the negotiations. They consider the process opaque, the access to information inadequate and they blame the government for the absence of a real substantial discussion”. 

Furthermore, the Tunisian Forum on Economic and Social Rights’ report quotes a poll carried out by Sigma Conseil and presented during a conference organised by SynAgri (Farmers’ Syndicate) and the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung in Tunis on April 10th, 2018. 

The study shows that 90% of the agricultural workers were not aware of the existence of the DCFTA, currently being negotiated. 

The challenge of accessing negotiation

The Tunisian Forum on Economic and Social Rights (FTDES) thus offered to produce a thorough impact assessment on each sector of the economy in order to provide the Tunisian lawmakers with more data and thus allow a better balance of the agreement’s net positive – or negative – impact on the Tunisian economy. 

“We do have a few studies on this agreement, but what we are really missing is a better understanding of the agreement’s consequences”, this is what declared Marco Jonville, the author of the FTDES’s report on the DCFTA and a researcher at the economic department of the FTDES. “We also need to know what people think and what they would consider as positive for the country because, to date, the suggested texts come from the EU, Tunisians are only reacting to them, at best. What are the suggestions and ideas of Tunisian stakeholders, whether they come from the economic or the agricultural sector, whether they are a CEOs or union members? This report’s goal was to pay attention to the Tunisian citizens’ suggestions.” 

DC-FT-A, divide and conceal?

The negotiations between the Tunisians and the Europeans on the DCFTA’s layout are still ongoing. The third negotiation round – and most recent one – took place from December 10th to 14th 2018. Samir Bettaïeb, the Tunisian Minister of Agriculture asserted on Shems FM on December 21th 2018 that the primary sector wasn’t ready for the DCFTA yet.

Ministers, civil society stakeholders or professionals agree wholeheartedly with him. And yet, some of the treaty’s measures are already enforced by Tunisian law. 

The PPP “private-public-partnerships”, the validity of European patents in Tunisia and international dispute-settlement are already a reality. The process of alignment of the Tunisian legislation with the European “acquis communautaire” is continuous and de facto excluded from the negotiations. 

Simultaneously, the EU “exerts a pressure on the Tunisian legislator, through the conditions that accompany the loans it grants to Tunisia. This was the case for the Macro-Financial Assistance loans of 2014 and 2016”, according to Maha Ben Gadha working in the economic program of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation – North Africa.

Trnaslation to English: An Hoang-Xuan