Linking 24 Economies

The British were still being kept waiting at the front door in Brussels. But last week the international lawyers of the Common Market were fixing up a side-door treaty with 18 former French and Belgian colonies in Africa (see map).

Ultimate purpose of the New Eurafrican Association is to link the French-speaking Africa states* and the Common Market Six in a giant free trade area. As soon as all 24 nations involved have ratified the treaty, the Common Market countries will abandon their tariffs on many of the African nations' chief exports (coffee, tea, pineapples, spices and cocoa). By 1967 the Common Market is pledged to abolish tariffs on all goods imported from their African associates.

To help the African states diversify their economies and thus become less dependent on their present subsidized relations with their former European rulers, the Six have agreed to give them $730 million in development aid over the next five years. France will then cease paying its 15 former colonies far more than world market prices for their products. The French Africans have agreed to lower their prices in gradual stages to the going world rates and to open their doors to exports and investments from all of the Six.

The new Brussels treaty is sure to outrage Latin American nations, which have not been mollified by a Common Market promise to reduce substantially the tariffs that the Six impose on coffee and other tropical products from Latin America. The treaty has even more serious implications for Britain's African colonies and former colonies, many of which depend on the same exports as French Africa does. Some of the British African states suspiciously regard the Common Market as a disguised form of neocolonialism. Ghana and Tanganyika have threatened to quit the Commonwealth if Britain joins the Market, even though British entry would entitle them to economic association with the Six. If they persist in this attitude, the British Africans may find their economies lagging behind their French-speaking neighbors.

*Except for left-wing Guinea, which angered De Gaulle by breaking all its ties with France in 1959.

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