In times of crisis nations need leadership.
Explaining to ordinary citizens the dangers that the global financial meltdown presents or speaking about why the countries of the Caribbean are signing the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Europe just as global markets are in crisis, mark out leaders with authority.
Despite this, what so far seems to be lost on much of the region’s political class is that when faced with challenging circumstances leaders have a duty to their electorates to rise above rhetoric and political posturing. They alone have to make clear in simple terms what is happening, build confidence and indicate how the decisions they have taken or are about to make, are going to help their nation’s and their peoples future.
Unfortunately across the world leaders are uncertain. The digital world is moving markets faster than they can think and their actual or perceived inability to act quickly is coming to be seen as a dereliction of duty. While this may be because economic globalisation has left political leaders with fewer national options, it also seems to reflect a twenty first century abandonment of belief and political philosophy and an acceptance that the markets will determine everyone’s future.
In the context of the global economic crisis not knowing how best to explain what is happening may in part be excusable, but in the context of the EPA – to be signed in Barbados on October 15 – the broad absence of high level explanations on the need for an EPA is hard to understand.
What is odd is that despite three years of negotiation Caribbean Heads of Government with some notable exceptions have only recently tried to explain why the region is signing the EPA. Indeed if it were not for the public warnings from Professor Norman Girvan, Sir Shridath Ramphal and others from mid-2007 onwards, it is probable that the signing would have occurred earlier and with minimal public debate on its broader consequences and implications.
This is not to criticise the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery, which delivered well a technically complicated brief, frequently ‘out-negotiating’ European officials who with some important exceptions were not interested at all in the EPA’s development aspects.
However, what was missing throughout the whole process was any political commentary accessible to ordinary people or a public campaign that explained in simple terms what was happening, that the whole process took place under Caribbean political direction and that the EPA was a response to the end of preference, economic globalisation and the need to respond to economic challenge of competition that the region cannot avoid.
What this seems to reflect is a simple truth. The substance of trade negotiations – like the problems facing the global financial system – is very difficult to encapsulate in a simple but honest political message. Both require leaders to convey convincingly the need for faith in something that has not yet happened and for electorates to trust where their governments are leading them.
In the Caribbean this is made unusually problematic because the policy on trade liberalisation, while notionally regional, requires responses, endorsement and implementation at a national level. The effect is that what is easy to agree at a national level is much more difficult to deliver nationally.
Thus for the past week Guyana has been trying at the eleventh hour to have added to the EPA a declaration that will allow for its concerns through a review every five years and language that will give the Caricom Treaty precedence over the EPA.
It has proposed text that at the time of writing is contentious in both the region and in Europe.
Guyana is proposing attaching a declaration that suggests that if in the EPA’s implementation should conflict with the revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, the Caricom Treaty would take precedence, thereby safeguarding as it sees it, the regional integration process. A second Guyanese clause suggests that there be a review of the EPA every five years to look at the socio-economic effect of the agreement on the people of the region and a commitment by Europe to address the adverse impact.
In the case of the former proposal the Dominican Republic has made clear that it has major reservations not least because it is not a member of Caricom. While in the case of the latter, Europe is unlikely to agree to ‘address any adverse impact’ most especially now that the future budgets of its member states and Europe’s economic development models are likely to be brought into question by the global economic crisis.
As anyone who reads what I write will know, I am broadly pro-EPA but have reservations about some of its aspects and the manner in which the last part of the negotiations were conducted politically by the European Commission. Added to this I now have serious concerns about where the Caribbean private sector will be as a result of the global economic crisis when the EPA’s tariff liberalisation provisions begin to bite.
The EPA is not and could never be a perfect agreement. It does however imply recognition of the need for the Caribbean to move on.
It also signals that those who move first and who try to relate the opportunity to what is now happening globally will benefit. Thus the Dominican Republic is already
shipping sugar to Europe (32,000 tons by the end of this month with a tripling expected by 2010), the regional tourism industry is to produce a manual to help the industry find out how to operationalise the EPA’s provisions, and others in the private sector are about to start asking both Cariforum and the EC how and when the EPA’ development commitments are to be implemented.
For all these reasons this is a moment for leadership. When the EPA is signed, politicians from Europe and the region need to say clearly and plainly why they are doing so and how, when and under what circumstances they expect the region’s people to benefit.
David Jessop is the Director of the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at david.jessop@caribbean-council.org
Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org
Editor’s note: This column should have been in yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek but was not received on time.
