KINGSTON. Jamaica - In 2020 the Cotonou Convention will expire. Then the trade, aid and development mechanism that links 79 nations in Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific (the ACP) to Europe may well come to an end without any successor agreement being put in pace.
How this has come about says as much about the way in which the world has changed since the convention was agreed in 2000 as it does about thinking that seeks to keep in place a special arrangement that linked Europe to its former colonies, without recognising the need to demonstrate value and achievement.
The existing convention is the successor to mechanisms stretching back to the Yaoundé Conventions of 1963 and 1969 and the Lomé Conventions I to IV that followed between 1975 and 2000, and may well be the last that seeks to bring together three geographically distant regions largely tied now by a common experience.