The European Union's ‘Everything But Arms’ development initiative and sugar: Preferential access or continued protectionism?

The European Union's ‘Everything But Arms’ (EBA) policy is a development initiative designed to offer least developed countries tariff- and quota-free access to the Union's market for all exports, with the exception of armaments. The Union argues that EBA reflects Europe's desire to see all WTO members benefit from trade liberalisation. In reality, however, market access improvements brought about as a direct result of EBA are limited to a restricted range of temperate agricultural products. In terms of export potential and employment generation, sugar is one of the most important products to be affected by EBA. However, plans to liberalise the protected European sugar market attracted strong resistance from several EU member states and the multinational sugar industry. This resulted in the initial EBA proposal on sugar being significantly weakened, both in terms of the level and security of market access. This paper examines the welfare effects of the EU's changing import regime for sugar and, for the first time, identifies potential winners and losers. The article concludes that the liberalisation of the European sugar market to least developed countries will not affect European farmers or producers and will be at the direct expense of other developing counties. The wider implications of this research are clear; the EU's first priority is to protect European farming interests from market liberalisation, even when protectionism is at the cost of some of the world's poorest countries and their peoples.