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Guyana Has No Regrets over Holding Out on EPA
By Peter Richards
MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, Jul 12, 2010 (IPS) - Two years after 14 Caribbean countries signed a wide-ranging
and controversial Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with
Europe, Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo still maintains that
his country was right in holding out until the last minute to
get a "better deal" for the Caribbean.
"I don't regret it. In fact today we feel more vindicated
than ever before that many of the things we said came to
pass and the agreement is haunting us in our negotiations
with others," Jagdeo told reporters during the just
concluded Caribbean Community (Caricom) heads of government
summit here.
Under the EPA, the European Union allows the 15-member
Caricom grouping plus the Dominican Republic (known as
CARIFORUM) duty- and quota-free access to its market in all
goods and services, with the Caribbean agreeing to open 80
percent of its market to the Europeans. Haiti signed in
2009.
Guyana, which did not attend the October 2008 signing
ceremony, had argued on a number of fronts, including
concerns that the "Most Favoured Nation" clause in the
accord – which commits CARIFORUM to grant Europe the same
treatment it grants to any 'major trading economy' in
subsequent free trade agreements, including developing
countries like China and trade blocs like Mercosur - would
affect Caricom's cooperation with South-South partners that
has been a feature in development economics for decades.
"Our holding out to the last day before the signing in the
face of threats of sanctions against Guyana brought us two
things - a mandatory five-year review in the document and a
provision that the EPA must not conflict with the revised
Treaty of Chargauramas" that governs the regional
integration grouping, he said.
"If we had held out more together, I think we could have
gotten much more," Jagdeo added, pointing out that African
countries which signed a similar EPA were now complaining
that "Europe does not want to offer them the five-year
review that we got and that is because we held out to the
last".
At last weekend's meeting here, the new Caricom chair,
Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding, conceded that there
have been "implementation shortfalls", some of which have to
do with capacity.
"It is a very, very complex agreement that requires a
considerable amount of work to be done," he said, urging a
greater involvement by the region's private sector.
"Governments, as far as I know, with one or two exceptions
...do not export anything. It's the private sector that
does," he said, adding that Caribbean countries "also have
to submit specific projects for funding under the EPA
development arrangement".
Last December, the EU announced that it would launch a 15-
million-dollar support programme this year aimed at
enhancing the competitiveness of Caribbean exports.
"We are hopeful that based on the consultations that we have
had with Brussels that we will be able to get approval at an
early point so that disbursement can be made," Golding said.
While key EPA institutions, such as the Joint CARIFORUM-EC
Ministerial Council, were finally launched this year, a
Caricom communiqué noted that given the weak global economy
"and the actions taken by the EU since the signing of the
agreement in 2008, heads called for an assessment of the
impact on the projected benefits under the agreement".
Antigua and Barbuda's Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer told
IPS that one of the one of the challenges confronting the
region is how to "extract from the European Union the
billions of dollars that they have available for the
Caribbean, and for some unknown reason or reasons known only
to themselves we have been unable to access those funds".
"Our contention right now is to find modalities that would
allow us to access European funding because it is there ...
and so we have been making the argument to the extent that
we need to improve upon our capacity in terms of human
resources and our ability let's say to put projects together
that are bankable and so on."
The Caribbean has already signalled that it would be looking
to Europe to help finance the operations of the Trinidad-
based Caribbean Public Health Agency (CPHA), which will
integrate the functions and administration of the Caribbean
Epidemiology Centre, the Caribbean Food and Nutrition
Institute, the Caribbean Environmental Health Institute, the
Caribbean Regional Drug Testing Laboratory and the Caribbean
Health Research Council.
St. Kitts and Nevis Prime Minister Dr. Denzil Douglas told
IPS that "there is a substantial amount of money" available
to the Caribbean under the European Development Fund (EDF),
and that the CPHA would need 54 million dollars to launch.
Last weekend, the head of the EU delegation to Barbados and
the Eastern Caribbean, Ambassador Valeriano Diaz, vowed
Europe's continued support, particularly as Caricom
continues to deal with the negative fallout from the global
financial and economic crisis.
"We are aware that the effects of the global crisis have
been transmitted to the regional economies with declines in
tourist arrivals and foreign direct investments and migrant
remittances," Diaz told a two-day joint EU-CARIFORUM
conference in Antigua on the financial services sector in
the Caribbean region.
"We are also aware that regional governments have been
working hard to mitigate the effects of the crisis on their
economies and societies in general," he said, noting that
the EU was able to respond quickly and adequately to the
impact of the financial and economic crisis on the
developing countries through initiatives such as support to
the International Monetary Fund and the grouping's own
Vulnerability Flex Mechanism.
(END)
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