Botswana, EU drop curtain of silence ahead of EPA talks

The Brussels meeting, due next week, will be the first meeting of negotiating teams since Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Mozambique signed an interim Economic Partnership Agreement(iEPA) with the EU last June. Since then, several changes at the EU's helm and the economic recession have forced a pause in negotiations, robbing the process of the momentum it gathered between 2008 and last year.

Botswana, the SADC-EPA Group's sitting chair, is scheduled to send a "sizeable" delegation to Brussels, led by the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Trade and Industry, Banny Molosiwa.