While the structural flaws inherent in the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between Cariforum and the European Union are acknowledged, the matter of why it is only now when it is almost too late that this country is registering objections to the agreement is something about which questions can be legitimately asked. Guyana at this point stands alone in Caricom (Haiti excepted, and its circumstances are special) in refusing to sign the EPA in its present form unless forced to do so. (If we do not sign Europe will probably apply the Generalised System of Preferences to our exports, and under those circumstances President Jagdeo has said he would sign.)
President Jagdeo’s proposal to the Cariforum countries in Barbados on September 10 that they should sign a goods-only agreement rather than the full EPA did not meet with much sympathy from his fellow Caribbean heads. Prime Minister Thompson of Barbados warned that reopening EPA negotiations could cause the entire process to collapse. Prime Minister Golding of Jamaica was equally blunt. “If we reopen the negotiations,” he said, “the issues that will be reopened are not just the ones that we are concerned about. The Europeans are going to want to list their items as well for reopening, and I don’t think that we want to go around that mulberry bush.”
As was suggested in yesterday’s editorial, Guyana’s almost twelfth-hour lobbying against the EPA was probably doomed to failure. So again, what took us so long to register our concerns with regional colleagues, and why were we not sensitizing them to our position at a much earlier date? Something rather more than a diplomatic lapse, however, may have been the implication of Prime Minister Thompson’s remark, when he expressed a measure of impatience either with this country, or perhaps with a few of those associated with its position. He was reported as saying the week before last that he was concerned about “persons who previously supported certain scenarios that we would have pushed for [and who are] now pretending that they know nothing about it and are acting as if they are the biggest advocates for us not signing.”
The negotiations for the EPA began in 2004, and were organized in phases. According to the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM) website, the first brief phase was designed to establish an understanding of the fundamental concerns and interests of EPA negotiations for both sides. The second phase which was to carry over to 2005 was to reach a common understanding on the priorities for the support of Caribbean regional integration, and the targets to be attained by January 1, 2008. The critical phases were the last two, more particularly the third.
The negotiations on the nitty-gritty, so to speak, were difficult, and the problems reaching accord in circumstances where there was a deadline to meet were reflected in the press releases from the CRNM, as well as being exposed in a discreet way by Mr David Jessop in his weekly column last year. All regional governments would have been aware of the full nature of the impediments, including their own lack of unity in some respects, so should they not have been especially alert to the possibility that given the time limit, the CRNM could have been under pressure to make concessions it otherwise might have resisted? Could it be the case, therefore, that the Government of Guyana did not perceive the potential danger until it was too late, and failed to monitor the progress of negotiations sufficiently closely at the end?
If that was so it was not because it had no mechanism by which it could have kept in contact with the CRNM. It had its own representative on the negotiating team, Dr Neville Totaram, and in addition to that, the regional negotiating machinery reports at one level to COTED. Our representative there is Minister of Foreign Trade, Dr Henry Jeffrey, who also represented Guyana directly at ministerial meetings in Brussels on the EPA. In recent months he has not had a great deal to say on the subject, and while he did chair a session at the recent national consultations held by President Jagdeo, he did not make a presentation. Furthermore, the President did not include him in the delegation to Barbados on September 10 – a rather glaring omission, some might think. Could it be inferred from this that there is a hiatus on the matter of the agreement between the head of state and his minister, or is there some other reason for him taking a back seat on an issue with which he has been intimately involved?
Of course, the Director-General of CRNM also reported directly to the Caricom heads at their heads of government meetings, and theoretically at least any one of them could have raised doubts or concerns directly at the time. According to its website, the CRNM is supported by expert associates and advisors, the former being listed as Sir Alister McIntyre, Professor Bishnodat Persaud, Professor Havelock Brewster and Professor Norman Girvan. The last two academics have condemned the EPA, and it would be useful to know, therefore, whether they were ever invited to the negotiations, and if they were and they attended, if the CRNM negotiators were made aware of their reservations. If they were invited and were unable to attend, of course, they too might have been caught unawares by the direction of negotiations towards the end.
Of course in a larger sense, some might argue that a strategic error was made at the very beginning, when the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group allowed itself to be disaggregated into six negotiating components for EPA purposes. The ACP to whose formation Guyana contributed so much served us well for over two decades, but clearly no work appears to have been done in recent years to maintain its solidarity in any active sense. The ACP as a whole, as opposed to the Caribbean Forum (Cariforum) of the ACP, would have had altogether greater weight in negotiations with Europe. As it is, the ACP meeting in Accra, which begins on the last day of this month, almost certainly comes too late to have any impact on this region’s agreement, which looks set to be signed with or without Guyana.
While given Guyana’s stance there inevitably would have been some strains between President Jagdeo and his counterparts in the region, one cannot help but feel that the uninhibited language about the other heads emanating from Georgetown is counter-productive. This is not a local squabble between the PPP/C and the PNCR, where almost anything seems to go; when dealing with fellow heads of government the conventions should be observed and diplomatic phraseology adhered to.
The President needs to rein in some of his spokesmen who have been on occasion quite vulgar in their expression. Apart from anything else, the Office of the President might yet have to sign the EPA, and if that is so, then the Government of Guyana will have to work with the other Cariforum countries on implementing the agreement. Should that time come, our situation will not be improved if relations have been soured by insults.