Over the last two weeks I have sought to establish that it is incorrect to assume that there are specific binding pledges of EU assistance to underpin the development dimension of the EPA. In this week’s article I shall explore the ‘consultation process’ within Caricom during the negotiation.
This has been advertised by both the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Mac-hinery (CRNM) and the EU negotiating body as highly successful. Both organisations proudly cite details of the many meetings held in the region during the process leaving the distinct impression that once the CRNM as the negotiating entity agreed to proposals at the bargaining table then ipso facto it meant that regional stakeholders’ consent and ownership were assured.
This, as it turns out, is a very contentious assumption, given the content, form, and other modalities of those consultations.
While it is true that both the CRNM and the EU negotiating body would have preferred otherwise, the results have in fact been very different from those anticipated.
Common thread
Design and architectural flaws constitute a common thread running through not only the consultations process, but several of the remaining contentious planks of the EPA which I previously listed, especially numbers 4 -9 (all 15 of these were listed in the first article of this series).
As we saw within the EU, some of these flaws were detected quite early in the process, as the several quotations which I previously cited from the Report of the Select Committee on International Development of the United Kingdom Parliament (2001) showed.
Unfortunately, similar critiques were not strongly echoed in the Caribbean. While there have been expressions of concern and reservations about the process, these were largely confined to individual academics and a few NGOs and worker/farmer organisations.
Concerned regional organisations developed limited solidarity actions with EU civil society groups. Similarly there was limited all ACP-wide solidarity. It would be fair to say, however, that in general, the period of EPA negotiations did not sufficiently engage the regional political process, with the result that the broad mass of Caribbean citizenry have remained marginalized. It is only now, after the EPA has been initialled that there has been strong regional outcry.
However, for most of the negotiations there was on-going governmental involvement and to varying degrees across the region, formal private sector bodies were also involved.
CRNM claims
The CRNM has advanced the view that it has pursued close and sustained consultations with government officials, representatives from private sector organizations and civil society. To avoid bias I cite the CRNM’s claims at some length:
“The process of negotiations of the EPA began years ago and involved a wide range of stakeholders.
These stakeholders in-cluded State representatives, the private sector and non-state actors […] Several fora were established to formulate regional negotiating positions. National positions which were formulated through national consultations, as well as the positions of regional sectoral interests and regional NGOs, were systematically harmonised and refined into coherent regional negotiating positions.
This coordination activity took place through a series of meetings which were open to officials from all Member States, the regional secretariats, regional private sector and the NGO community. This forum of the Technical Working Group (TWG) convened at least 29 meetings since the official launch of the EPA negotiations in 2004. Of that total, 11 were devoted to market access issues in goods. Consultations on services were also considerable as 8 TWGs were convened. Through these processes, the ensuing dialogue and exchange of positions through proposals and research papers would have engendered continuous consensus building.” (CRNM website)
Readers are also recommended to consult the CRNM’s: Stakeholders Participation in the EPA Negotiations on its website.
Regrettably, there was a large gap between the CRNM’s rather formularistic description of the consultation process and the reality and substance of those consultations.
One finds that just as there were marked asymmetries in the human, financial, and institutional re-sources available to the EU negotiating body and those of the CRNM, similar negotiating asymmetries were evident between the CRNM, as the negotiating organization for Caricom, and those of the member states and the various national and regional private sector bodies on whose behalf it was negotiating.
Weaknesses
As a result several readily identifiable weaknesses in these consultations emerged. The most important I believe was that the scope of the consultations was pre-determined and effectively limited to one of two options for Caricom.
One was the EPA and the other the EU’s resort to the General System of Preferences (GSP) in order to satisfy the WTO rules and to meet the waiver deadline (31.12.07).
The choice for those who challenged the EPA itself was reduced to the lesser of two evils. No effort was made to explore outside the EPA box and to search for non-EPA non-GSP options, within the evolving framework of the Doha Development Round of negotiations at a multilateral level.
As it turned out it was left to think-tanks in Europe and the USA to explore these options and make public their findings.
I shall return to a fuller analysis of this topic later. The point I wish to make here is that basically the methodology of CRNM’s consultations was flawed by its own deliberate avoidance of consideration of options other than the two on offer by the EU.
The region, therefore, was largely reactive to EU positions.
Realizing this, the EU made clear very early on in the process that it was not preparing a ‘Plan B’ in the event the WTO-waiver deadline was breached.
In the absence of counter- proposals for framework agreements from CARIFORUM or for that matter other ACP-EPA groupings, other options were effectively foreclosed and the only options that remained were those cited earlier, that is, if an EPA was not in place the EU would impose GSP duties on non-LDCs but LDCs could resort to EPA status.
