We suggested last week, in our editorial on “The EPA and Regional Undercurrents” that the manner in which the discussion on the outcome of the EPA negotiations with Europe had been conducted among governments, could well lead the onlooker to believe that there is a great divide among them on the issue of the appropriate path to economic growth and development and the role of ex ternal assistance in it.
We made specific reference to the rather stringent remarks made, in recent months, by Prime Minister Golding on what he perceived to be differing assumptions about the basis on which the negotiation between the EPA and Cariforum should have taken place. He had hinted that some Governments and other critics of the EPA had been inclined to adopt an attitude of “mendicancy” towards the EU; and he urged them to accept that for the future the era of the “begging bowl” was over.
We were inclined to the view that Prime Minister Golding, in his enthusiasm to bring the EPA negotiations to a conclusion and to urgent implementation, might have given a wrong impression of the stances taken by the critics of the Agreement, who had given substantial reasons for their views of its shortcomings, and among whom were persons of distinction in the field of diplomacy.
This intra-Caribbean contention has seemed to have reached such a stage that the European Union itself, through its Deputy Director for Trade at the Commission and Principal Negotiator of the Agreement , Mr Falkenberg, felt constrained to set out its own justifications for it to the public, as published in our edition of October 10th. This basically reiterates that what the EU promised to do in its Green Paper of 1996 and subsequent positions, it has done in respect of development aid, supporting regional integration and ensuring that the trade provisions now agreed are immeasurably better than the only alternative arrangement for access to the EU market on the table, the “Generalised System of Preferences”.
Mr Falkenberg’s observations are specifically pointed at the position of Guyana, but we can surely take it that the general statements that he makes are considered applicable to the other members of the Cariforum. And, further, an underlying sentiment in his statement would seem to be that certainly in respect of the Region’s main agricultural commodities , sugar, rice and bananas, the best that could be done in the current circumstances of adjusting to a WTO regime utilized not only by the United States but also some of Caricom’s fellow-developing countries, has been done.
So we can read from the perspective of the EU today, that what is required is that Cariforum states get on with the business of adjustment and transition from the old commodities, whose production is no longer viable under the future rules of competition, to new products and new types of services that can be within the countries’ grasp. Cariforum states need to recognize, in that context, that they now are, or will soon be on the road to being, in similar circumstances in international trade to other countries, and other developing countries in the world, perhaps except the Everything But Arms group.
These perspectives, it would seem, are those that are held by Jamaica, and perhaps by other Cariforum states. The Dominican Republic for example, which has never had, as an ex-colonial Caribbean state, terms of access to the EU market similar to those of the Caricom states, now is presented with the prospect of participating virtually fully in the trade of the formerly preference-bound ACP commodities. Indeed it has now reached the point to which its former colonial master, Spain, pointed when that country joined the European Community, and one of its leading nationals took over the position of Trade Commissioner. And even since then, the tables have turned for the DR in respect of its banana trade whose access to the EU, along with Caricom exports, it has fought persistently for. The Windward Islands of Caricom are having to depend periodically for filling their quotas on the DR, and sometimes for transport as well. And the dominant Jamaican producer, as we heard recently, will no longer export bananas from that country, but seek to do so from its Central American estates.
Barbados too, has also in a sense gone beyond the position of long-term, or even medium-term maintenance of preference conditions for its own sugar trade, as it seeks to reduce the acreage which it devotes to sugar and plans rather, in terms of sugar-derivatives as exports. The country is firmly committed also to a future essentially in services of various kinds, and must see no further cost-benefit in having recourse to maintenance of preferences, or strategising for any imperceptible future, on reducing preferences.
The position therefore seems like an open-and-shut case in favour of the Jamaican perspective.
And yet, the Jamaican Prime Minister has also recently sought to put another case on the future advancement of developing countries, including his own, in the new international economic environment. For in his speech to the United Nations General Assembly on September 26th this year, he has chosen to emphasise the traditional disadvantages of developing countries, and small developing countries at that, that we have been accustomed to hearing over the years.
First, Mr Golding reminded his listeners, much as say, President Jagdeo might have done, that “globalization, despite increasing production and expanding trade…has widened the gap between rich and poor within and among countries”; and that in the light of the apparent downturn in the global economy, many developing countries “are called up to respond within our limited capacity to protect the most vulnerable”.
Secondly he observes that in trying to achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015, “we are behind schedule”; and while averring that “developing countries must ensure that their priorities are properly structured”, he calls upon the developed states to “live up to their commitment to devote 0.7% of their GEP to Official Development Assistance”.
Then the Prime Minister goes back almost 20 years, to sentiments expressed (though against a different Jamaican economic background) by his predecessor, then Prime Minister Edward Seaga, and also by then Governor of the Central Bank of Jamaica, Arthur Brown, to the Inter-American Development Bank and other financial institutions – what Golding calls “the peculiar challenges for Middle-Income Developing Countries”. This classification, he observes, based on per capita income, of certain developing countries as “middle income countries…deprives them of access to concessionary financing and creative measures to reduce the crippling debt burden that afflicts so many of them. If we are to reduce poverty, the peculiar circumstances of these countries cannot be ignored since that is where more than one third of the world’s poor are to be found. We call upon the international community to devise strategic programs to address the peculiar needs of middle income countries with deep pockets of poverty”. To this end he prefers a description of them as “Small Vulnerable and Highly Indebted countries”.
In 1988, Mr Seaga used the argument about middle income developing countries like Jamaica to plead for certain kinds of assistance, and access conditions, which could sustain their momentum towards “developed” category status – pushing them over the top, so to speak – while at the same time helping them to cope with social negatives, including urban poverty, that were taken as a partial function of the race to developed status.
It is probably an indication of the innovative character of Jamaican diplomacy that Prime Minister Golding is able to use virtually the same argument in support of a plea for help with debt. A plea for help, without the “begging bowl” outstretched? And while pleading, in his speech for an “equitable international trading system”, in much the same terms as the critics of the EPA.
It is undoubtedly the case, that there is a widening gap between advancing developing countries of the 1960’s to mid-70’s like Jamaica, and those also with substantial natural resources in demand in that period, like Guyana. Both countries find themselves in prolonged difficulty. While the OECS states tremble at the loss of agricultural preferences, or negative international conditions in respect of services like tourism.
The EPA differences in part reflect the differing dimensions of the difficulties, or of the prospects, facing these various Caricom countries. When we look back, and in spite of the deep recession that affected critical members of Caricom in the 1980’s and onwards, we see a decision taken to establish the Single Market and Economy, and then later a commitment to negotiate a change in the nature of our relations with the EU, without any substantial discussion at the inter-governmental level of a need to reconsider the paths to development taken immediately after independence, the real prospects for integration in a period of recession, and the critical domestic initiatives that need to be taken to sustain a regional integration effort as essentially a tool for economic advancement.
Perhaps such a discussion is necessary now, in order to find some form of consensus among state leaderships in a period of diversity, if this is still possible. Perhaps our Caribbean Development Bank should be charged with such a task?
