Introduction
My Sunday Stabroek column last week ended with the observation that, the European Community (EC) ‒ African, Caribbean, Pacific (ACP) Sugar Protocol under which about 90 per cent of Guyana’s export of raw sugar was made, is a direct descendant of the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement (CSA), which Britain had put in place in 1951 so as to avoid future disruption in the supply of raw sugar from its colonial possessions to UK refineries, including war time. However, as a condition for its entry into the EC, the CSA was transitioned into a broader Sugar Protocol (SP) in 1975, this time between the EC and its colonial and post-colonial possessions in the ACP.
For our immediate purposes, four features of the SP should be constantly borne in mind. One is that it was a legal (treaty) obligation of the EC to purchase 1.3 million tonnes of sugar (raw or white) from the specified ACP countries, based on a mutually agreed and pre-determined annual allocation of quotas.
The second feature is that, as an agreement covering the purchase and sale of sugar, the ACP countries were obligated to