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14 February 2020Afruibana wishes you a happy new year. May it be for you, at any level, an opportunity for development and fulfillment.
2020 will be a decisive year for the African fruit sectors, with the conclusion of the post-Cotonou Agreement negotiations and the definition of cooperation budgets that will sustainably shape political and economic relations between ACP countries and the European Union. Faced with an explosion of international competition and significant deterioration of our access to European markets in recent years, our association remains more than ever mobilized. A breaking point has been reached with the withdrawal of the stabilization mechanism on December, 31st last year.
While the ACP-EU partnership has long been positive and structuring for our sector and acknowledged as such by all stakeholders, it is now threatened by an exclusively deregulatory approach that benefits neither European or African citizens, nor their governments and seriously threatens the structure of decades of cooperation. The challenge today is to build a truly forward-looking partnership that offers concrete development prospects for African agricultural sectors.
In this perspective, Afruibana will present this year its White Paper on African Banana which will propose a set of solutions and investment fields to enable the sector to continue its efforts to become more competitive, accelerate its agroecological transition, multiply its initiatives to “decarbonise” its value chain, maintain essential social services provided in rural areas and thus resolutely follow the European Green Pact approach and help achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
You can therefore more than ever count on us to bring the voice of African fruit producers before international decision-makers in 2020 and defend a model of sustainable and responsible development that will enable our continents to harvest tomorrow the fruits of common prosperity together.
Sincerely yours,
Joseph Owona Kono – President
Jean-Marie Kakou-Gervais – Vice-President
Anthony Blay – Vice-President
Jean-François Billot – Secretary-General
Albertine Yange – Europe Delegate