The European Union (EU) has vigorously pursed Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) with African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries in line with the Post-Washington Consensus (PWC). The European Commission (2016) insists that trade liberalisation under EPAs will be conducive to development objectives enshrined in the ACP-EU Cotonou Agreement (2000Agreement ( -2020 and to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). According to EU officials, trade liberalisation will be win-win for both blocs, leading to growth, jobs and social prosperity. This optimistic outlook is, however, contested by numerous civil society organisationsand certain members of the European Parliament -who claim that EPAs will impose premature liberalisation upon former colonies (see European Parliament 2016 and NANTS 2015). Deprived of policy space to set robust tariffs to protect infant industry and sensitive agricultural sectors, ACP countries will, according to EPA sceptics, become losers of free trade. This debate is shaping negotiations for the successor treaty to the Cotonou Agreement and has prompted preferences among African states for intra-African trade liberalisation under the African Union and the African Continent Free Trade Area (ACFTA), as a precursor to EPAs.
This article examines the development implications of the EPAs in the case of WestAfrica's cocoa sector. In so doing it critiques the EU's embrace of private sector development (PSD) discourse to legitimise trade liberalisation. The European Commission (2015) promises that it will give aid to ACP private sector operations to ensure that they can compete on a level playing field in EPA liberalised markets (see Langan and Price 2015 for critique of EU aid modalities in West Africa). The EU is in strict alignment here with broader PWC norms of achieving 'pro-poor' free market reform via aid for developing countries' private sector actors, as is enshrined in UN SDG 8. As existing critical literature on the PWC and the UN SDGs highlights, PSD discourse is a crucial lynchpin of contemporary donor thinking (see Onis and