The Africa-European Union summit ended yesterday in Portugal with agreement on many global challenges but with differences on other key issues.

European and African Union leaders left the Portuguese capital expressing satisfaction for the most part with their first summit in seven years and what they called a new spirit in relations between the two continents.

The head of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, said they agreed that climate change probably represents the most important challenge of the 21st Century.

"Climate change is not just an issue for environment," he said. "It's also an issue for development. And only with the commitment of African leaders and European leaders can we really achieve some progress."

The leaders agreed to increase efforts to fight deforestation and desertification.

The president of the European Union, Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates, said the summit's plan to deal with migration was an example of the new partnership. He says the leaders want to combat illegal immigration but encourage legal migration and help immigrants to integrate more fully into their new countries.

The leaders agreed to develop information programs for would-be migrants in Africa and to address the drain of African skilled workers by promoting ethical recruitment policies in critical fields.

On governance, the head of the African Union, Ghana's President John Kufuor, said Africa has an interest in good governance and respect for human rights.

"Transparency is the order of the day," he said. "This is not to saying there is perfection. The point is that we all see that it is with good governance that we will attract the partnerships for development that we need."

He noted that the AU has created mechanisms such as the Africa Peer Review to promote these ideals.

The leaders also agreed to promote security by developing a system for rapid conflict prevention and funds for an African rapid deployment force, but human rights issues brought discord.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel criticized Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe's human rights record as bringing shame on the continent. This led Mr. Mugabe to accuse her of arrogance. A dispute over whether to invite Mr. Mugabe blocked the summit for five years and was only resolved a few months ago.

Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir met with United Nations officials seeking to deploy a joint U.N.-Africa peacekeeping force in Darfur. The two sides said some clarifications were obtained but that critical needs remain, in particular air support.

The issue of free trade agreements caused the most public controversy. Senegal's President Abdoulaye Wade said the accords would set back African development.

He says there is no African industry that can withstand competition from Europe with its millions of consumers.

Most African governments have refused to sign the accords. The accords exempt African exports from European tariffs but also call for lower African tariffs on European goods. European officials said negotiations will continue.

Civic organizations had little praise for the summit. The Oxfam group said African opposition to the trade agreements should serve as a wake-up call to European leaders.

Human Rights Watch said the summit failed to make any progress on restoring the rule of law in Zimbabwe, bringing peace to Darfur or preventing banks from protecting the wealth of corrupt officials.

And Save The Children called the meeting a high profile exercise of little substance, noting that five million African children continue to die of preventable causes every year. It said since the leaders declared this a summit of equals they must bear equal responsibility for its failures.

The just concluded Africa-EU Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, offered African leaders an opportunity to state the African case without ambiguity. President Abdoulie Wade of Senegal, the unofficial spokesman of his peers, said: “I agree with this spirit of creating a new relationship [with Europe], but we have to define what that relationship is.” For too long, Africans have behaved like a lamb to the slaughter, swallowing whole any measure rammed down our throats by our European brothers and sisters.

Although we believe in mutual interdependence, it is now time for Africans to think and act for themselves. It is now time for Africans to stipulate the rules of the game, without having to be subservient to Europeans every time. African leaders did just that when they rejected the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) proposed to come into force on January 1 2008, after the expiration on December 31 of the waiver by the World Trade Organization (WTO) on preferential trade arrangements for developing countries. This is just another subtle attempt to impoverish Africa further. African leaders must never ever have a second thought on their rejection of this pernicious package. They did the right thing for Africa; and we must stick to it, come rain or sunshine.

The Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates underlined this new dawn when he said: “We are here to write an entirely new page in the history of relations between Europe and Africa.” And the Ghanaian president John Kufour was spot on when he pointed out that Africa needs Europe as much as Europe needs Africa. If African leaders are assertive enough, they can undo the existing donor-beneficiary relationship and replace it with it one that is mutually reciprocal. How? Africa needs infrastructure and Europe needs our mineral wealth. If our leaders know what they are doing, they can strong arm Europe to do our bidding in every way.

It is for this reason we disagree with President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa that lack of resources is one of the biggest challenges facing Africa. The biggest trouble facing Africa is bad governance, not lack of resources. All we need at this point in time is a selfless, responsible and visionary leadership to harness the abundant human and material resources across the continent in order to guarantee a better life for the people of Africa.

President Mbeki’s address at the Africa-EU Summit is a variation on the same theme of his address at the 62nd Session of the UN General Assembly on 25 September 2007. In that address, the South African leader called for “massive resource transfers through development assistance, investment, trade, technology transfers and human resource development to poor countries”. President Mbeki’s call is illusory, as experience has shown that Western development aid comes with a sting in the tail.

We note with regret that President Yahya Jammeh, a pan-Africanist of note, was absent at the Africa-EU Summit. President Jammeh has been conspicuous by his absence from similar summits in recent times. He was absent from the 62nd Session of the UN General Assembly, the last AU Summit in Ghana, and the African-Taiwan Summit in Taipei. As an ardent critic of imperialism and unfair world trade practices, President Jammeh should have endeavoured to grace these summits with his presence to propagate his beliefs where they could have had the most impact.

The summit of more than 70 African and European Union nations has opened in Portugal with an acknowledgement that conflicts, human rights violations and poverty continue to pose challenges. Portuguese Prime Minister Jose Socrates opened the summit on today, calling it a meeting of equals in a community of nations that shares a historic duty.

The Portuguese leader promised a frank and open discussion with no taboos. This was seen as a reference to issues such as conflicts and human rights violations in Africa as well as historical injustices in Euro-African relations.

The chairman of the African Union, Ghana's President John Kuofor, said the relationship between Africa and Europe during the past 500 years has been unhappy, characterized by the slave trade, colonialism and apartheid. He said a new relationship is needed to correct what he called a historic inhumanity.

"The real significance of the Africa-EU summit must therefore be to lay the foundations of a new partnership based on mutual respect and a genuine commitment to pursue the mutual interests of our two continents," he said.

The leaders are to establish a new strategic partnership with eight priority areas. These include peace and security, governance and human rights, economic development, environmental degradation, migration and trade.

The President of the African Union Commission, Alpha Oumar Konare, said the relationship must avoid charity, paternalism and false promises.

He says no one will solve Africa's ills for it. Africa must play the game of globalization but not unilateral globalization based solely on market forces. Konare said the new partnership must develop ways to address this issue.

Efforts to hold the Africa-EU summit have been thwarted for the past five years by a dispute over Zimbabwe's human rights record. President Robert Mugabe's invitation this year prompted a boycott by Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain, Zimbabwe's former colonial ruler.

Human rights activists have protested that summit leaders are ignoring suffering and oppression on the continent. And opponents of globalization said the summit's approach to boosting trade would aggravate poverty.

European leaders have been intent on holding the meeting because of competition for Africa's markets coming from China, India and other emerging nations.

Leaders of Africa and the European Union have ended their summit in Portugal by declaring a new era in relations aimed at confronting new global challenges. But they could not avoid sparring over some older issues involving human rights and conflict on the continent.

The president of the European Union, Portugal's Prime Minister Jose Socrates, closed the summit today, saying African and European leaders have turned a new page in history. He says the leaders have adopted an agenda to confront serious challenges of security, governance, migration and climate change.

Nevertheless, long-standing disagreements re-emerged during the two-day meeting.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in her speech on governance and human rights, accused Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe of harming Africa's image by quashing political freedom and human rights in his country.

Mr. Mugabe was invited to the summit despite being banned from Europe five years ago because of rigged elections in his country. His attendance prompted a boycott by the prime minister of Britain, Gordon Brown, the former colonial power in Zimbabwe.

The head of the African Union, Ghana's President John Kufuor, responded to Ms. Merkel's remarks by noting that South African President Thabo Mbeki is mediating talks between Zimbabwe's ruling party and the opposition in an effort to bring free and fair elections next year.

"It is not for anybody to just move in there and impose a solution," he said. "We want to encourage a home-grown solution so there will be a restoration of normalcy and good governance for the people of Zimbabwe."

Several European leaders met with Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir and strongly urged him to allow the deployment of U.N. and A.U. troops to end bloodshed and suffering in its Darfur region. Sudan has accepted this hybrid force, but has rejected troops from non-African countries.

Mr. Kufuor said Africa has taken the initiative on the issue, though he acknowledged it has taken some time to assemble the hybrid force.

"I believe with good will all around the hybrid force will be put together so at least humanitarian actions can be brought to the people of Darfur," added Mr. Kufuor.

African leaders also objected to the E.U. efforts to forge temporary trade agreements with developing nations, which they say will unleash excessive competition on their emerging economies. The European Union says these are needed because existing accords are due to expire at the end of this month.

E.U. Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso noted that these are temporary agreements that are meant to maintain tariff exemptions for African exports to the European Union.

"Once we have settled this transitional phase, we [will] have the time and the spirit to address development issues and important concerns that were raised also from the African Union side," said Barroso.

He said he believes that all but a few African governments will sign the interim accords by the end of the year.

The leaders agreed to hold their next summit in a couple of years on African soil.

Greenpeace International today urged political leaders from Europe and Africa, attending a joint summit in Lisbon, to play an active role in ending tropical deforestation which accounts for roughly one-fifth of global greenhouse emissions.

Activists unfurled a banner on the Vasco Da Gama tower, overlooking the meeting, reading “Save the Climate - Save African forests” and urged the leaders to make an immediate commitment to protect Africa’s dwindling forests. 

A recent briefing by Greenpeace outlines how climate change is a direct threat to Africa as the frequency of extreme events such as droughts and floods are expected to increase. Africa's intact rainforests act as a regulator of rainfall for the region. Acting as vast stores of carbon, which would otherwise be released as the global warming gas carbon dioxide, forests also help brake the further acceleration of climate change.

“Leaders in Lisbon have to exercise political muscle and immediately support a halt to deforestation in Africa,” said Stephan Van Praet, Africa forests campaign co-ordinator of Greenpeace International. “The second phase of the Kyoto Protocol is five years away and urgent measures are needed now to protect Africa’s forests and also ban illegal and destructive logging,” he added.

Greenpeace also wants government leaders in Lisbon to send a strong message to their delegations at the UN climate talks, being held in Bali, Indonesia, to include reductions in greenhouse gases from deforestation in the negotiating mandate for extending the Kyoto Protocol.

“European and African leaders need to send a clear signal to the Bali climate talks about the importance of ending deforestation,” said Van Praet. “Forest-rich nations, like those of Central Africa, stand to gain enormously if the extension of Kyoto includes a new international financing mechanism to protect forests and provide income to local communities,”

Earlier this week, in Bali, Greenpeace proposed a 'Tropical Deforestation Emissions Reduction Mechanism' combining market-based and central government funding which would reward and incentivise reductions in deforestation in development countries.

European countries, as major greenhouse gas emitters and consumers of tropical timber, have a responsibility to be more active in supporting African nations in the development of forest protection measures. One priority is legislation to prevent illegal timber from being sold on the European market. This would bolster Europe's credibility in efforts against both climate change and forest destruction.

Greenpeace believes it is possible to keep the worst impacts of climate change - such as extreme weather events, water crises and increased hunger - from putting millions of people at risk. This calls for a revolution in the production and use of energy, and a commitment to stop deforestation globally within 10 years. Governments must commit to bigger emissions reduction targets in the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol in order to keep the rise in global mean temperature as far below a threshold of 2 degrees Celsius as possible.