Fissures over EU trade deal
Unknowns in trade pact generate uneasiness among potential signatories
Soon after beating the Dec. 31 deadline last year, Caribbean leaders were patting themselves on the back for having achieved a “far reaching” Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Europe that they said would help ensure the future socio-economic development of the region.
But just a few weeks before the signing, some key governments appear uncomfortable with the final agreement, even though the region’s top negotiator Richard Bernal insists it was the best deal possible.
“In any negotiation you don’t get everything. The Europeans did not get everything, nor did we,” said Bernal, who heads the Barbados-based Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM).
There has long been division within the Caribbean over the EPA, which Europe is also negotiating separately with the 79-member African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of states, to replace a special export regime for cane sugar and other economically critical goods from these countries that had been in place since the mid-1970s.
Under the new agreement, the Caribbean will now have to open nearly 90 percent of its market to duty-free imports of EU products over the next 25 years. The new accord calls for 82.7 percent to be liberalized in the first 15 years and there will be a moratorium of three years on all tariffs except those on motor vehicles, spare parts and gasoline coming into the region.
Other duties and charges are to be kept during the first seven years and then phased out in the following three years. Rice will not be among the commodities liberalized upon entry into force of the EPA.
But even as the ink was drying on the accord reached between the CARIFORUM countries — Caribbean Community and the Dominican Republic — and Europe last year, Guyana was particularly vocal in its opposition, with President Bharrat Jagdeo saying it was a “situation we were forced into.”
“It was a systematic and well thought-out ploy by Europe to dismantle the solidarity of the ACP by effectively dividing the ACP into six negotiating bases with six agreements; playing one off against the other,” he said, adding that Europe acted in bad faith in this regard.
“If Europe supported regional integration through lip service and financial flows, and encourages small states to come together in economic partnership agreements so they can have economies of scale, how is it that they don’t want our products to qualify under the rules of origin that they have established now through the EPA?” Jagdeo asked. He warned that the EPA could now set the standard for other trade agreements with developed countries.
Many Caribbean academics, trade unionists and nongovernmental organizations have signed a petition critical of the regional governments for not fully informing the Caribbean population about “the far-reaching consequences of the legally and permanently binding articles of the agreement.”
Former Caribbean diplomat Sir Ronald Sanders, who served as Antigua and Barbuda’s high commissioner to London from 1995-2004, noted that, “We have an agreement that people are praising but very few people have seen. There are Members of Parliament and persons in government who have never read the agreement and have no idea what it says.”
“I have read it and I still don’t understand much of it, and I have been involved in trade negotiations for a long time,” he added.
Another distinguished Caribbean economist, Prof. Clive Thomas, who is now director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Guyana.
Argued that using a mixture of bullying, bribery, cajolery, intellectual dishonesty and plain bluff, Europe had been able to “work a monumental deception on the region.”
Soon after beating the Dec. 31 deadline last year, Caribbean leaders were patting themselves on the back for having achieved a “far reaching” Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Europe that they said would help ensure the future socio-economic development of the region.
But just a few weeks before the signing, some key governments appear uncomfortable with the final agreement, even though the region’s top negotiator Richard Bernal insists it was the best deal possible.
“In any negotiation you don’t get everything. The Europeans did not get everything, nor did we,” said Bernal, who heads the Barbados-based Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM).
There has long been division within the Caribbean over the EPA, which Europe is also negotiating separately with the 79-member African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of states, to replace a special export regime for cane sugar and other economically critical goods from these countries that had been in place since the mid-1970s.
Under the new agreement, the Caribbean will now have to open nearly 90 percent of its market to duty-free imports of EU products over the next 25 years. The new accord calls for 82.7 percent to be liberalized in the first 15 years and there will be a moratorium of three years on all tariffs except those on motor vehicles, spare parts and gasoline coming into the region.
Other duties and charges are to be kept during the first seven years and then phased out in the following three years. Rice will not be among the commodities liberalized upon entry into force of the EPA.
But even as the ink was drying on the accord reached between the CARIFORUM countries — Caribbean Community and the Dominican Republic — and Europe last year, Guyana was particularly vocal in its opposition, with President Bharrat Jagdeo saying it was a “situation we were forced into.”
“It was a systematic and well thought-out ploy by Europe to dismantle the solidarity of the ACP by effectively dividing the ACP into six negotiating bases with six agreements; playing one off against the other,” he said, adding that Europe acted in bad faith in this regard.
“If Europe supported regional integration through lip service and financial flows, and encourages small states to come together in economic partnership agreements so they can have economies of scale, how is it that they don’t want our products to qualify under the rules of origin that they have established now through the EPA?” Jagdeo asked. He warned that the EPA could now set the standard for other trade agreements with developed countries.
Many Caribbean academics, trade unionists and nongovernmental organizations have signed a petition critical of the regional governments for not fully informing the Caribbean population about “the far-reaching consequences of the legally and permanently binding articles of the agreement.”
Former Caribbean diplomat Sir Ronald Sanders, who served as Antigua and Barbuda’s high commissioner to London from 1995-2004, noted that, “We have an agreement that people are praising but very few people have seen. There are Members of Parliament and persons in government who have never read the agreement and have no idea what it says.”
“I have read it and I still don’t understand much of it, and I have been involved in trade negotiations for a long time,” he added.
Another distinguished Caribbean economist, Prof. Clive Thomas, who is now director of the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Guyana.
Argued that using a mixture of bullying, bribery, cajolery, intellectual dishonesty and plain bluff, Europe had been able to “work a monumental deception on the region.”
