(Adds timing of troika, Caricom delay, Louis Michel quote)
By David Lewis
ACCRA, Oct 3 (Reuters) - Europe should stop pressuring the world's poorest states to sign individual trade deals and allow more time for African, Caribbean, Pacific (ACP) nations to agree a common negotiating platform, ACP members said on Friday.
A declaration by leaders of the 79-nation ACP group meeting at a summit in Ghana will call on Friday for undisrupted trade access to the European Union market, said Mauritius's Foreign Affairs Minister Arvin Boolell, citing a draft of the document.
The ACP group, which represents 300 million people and includes some of the world's least developed nations, has been struggling to maintain a united front in the face of pressure from Brussels to sign Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA).
The EU says the accords are needed to make its long-running preferential trade arrangements with the ACP compliant with WTO rules, and many of the developing group's members, fearing exclusion from the European market, have signed interim deals.
But ACP leaders say this has fractured the unity of developing countries and weakened their ability as a bloc to negotiate better terms of trade for their often vulnerable, commodity-exporting economies.
"There is a common feature to the ongoing debate -- that solidarity of ACP should not be undermined. The EPA seems to have created division and diversion rather than convergence," Boolell told Reuters.
"It is not simply because we export mostly to the EU that we should feel we are cornered," Boolell added. The ACP nations send more than a quarter of what they export to the EU.
ACP economies, already squeezed by high food and fuel prices, are now facing the risk of reduced aid and investment from the developed world, as a result of its banking crisis.
Outgoing ACP chairman President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan on Thursday accused rich countries of using "blackmail" to bully poor states into accepting bad terms of trade.
Bashir, who faces a possible International Criminal Court (ICC) indictment for war crimes in Sudan's Darfur, left the summit on Thursday without waiting for its conclusion. He handed the ACP chairmanship to Ghanaian President John Kufuor.
NEGOTIATIONS IN OCTOBER
Boolell said a high-level mission of ACP leaders would travel to Europe to lobby for more time for a convergent solution between the two groups on the trade question.
"In between ... summits, we need a troika that will convey the message loud and clear," he said.
That troika would begin its mission by the end of October, Kufuor said.
Its negotiations may delay the signing of a trade agreement between the 15-member Caribbean Community (Caricom) and the EU, which is scheduled for Oct. 15, Caricom Secretary General Edwin Carrington said. The Caricom deal has already slipped from an earlier target date of June 30.
Glenys Kinnock, a member of the European Parliament and co-president of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, said both developing and developed countries were facing "a perfect storm of ecological, financial and social pressures".
Reflecting criticism from within the European Parliament, Kinnock called the EPAs "messy, confused and contradictory to the numerous commitments to trade justice made by the EU".
She criticised the European Commission's approach to the trade deals, saying it viewed them as free trade agreements aimed at opening markets, rather than as development tools.
EU Aid Commissioner Louis Michel defended the EPAs.
"I remain deeply convinced that these agreements will allow our development partners to take full advantage of the positive effects of globalisation," he told a closed meeting session in a prepared paper seen by Reuters.
Anti-poverty and fair trade campaigners have said that unless the ACP can find a strong unified negotiating position, it risks losing relevance in international relations. (For full Reuters Africa coverage and to have your say on the top issues, visit: http://africa.reuters.com/) (Editing by Pascal Fletcher)
