President Bharrat Jagdeo and Minister of Foreign Trade Dr Henry Jeffrey are expected to join regional counterparts today in Jamaica for what is likely to be a stormy two-day meeting on a regional economic partnership (EPA) with the EU and sugar is expected to take centre stage.
Ahead of today’s meeting, EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson says that the Cariforum group and the European Union are committed “to doing everything possible to reach an agreement before the trade preferences of the Cotonou Agreement and the WTO waiver protecting these arrangements from challenge by non-ACP developing countries expire at the end of the year.”
In a statement, jointly issued by Mandelson and the EU Development Commissioner Louis Michel, the trade commissioner said that “EPA negotiations between the EU and the Caribbean region are well advanced. As in any negotiation in its final stages, there are a number of issues which require clear political guidance to be resolved.”
The Caribbean has condemned the manner in which the EU continues to make unilateral decisions on agreements reached between both parties in the past to the detriment of the Caribbean and the wider ACP grouping, including the slashing of prices for sugar on the European market as part of their market reforms and last week’s scrapping of the Sugar Protocol agreed to over 32 years ago.
Mandelson said he believed that both sides were committed to “an agreement that secures and expands preferential terms of Caribbean trade with the EU, encourages regional integration within the Caribbean and removes the threat of legal challenge from other developing countries.”
He added that he was confident “that we can put the Economic Partnership Agreement at the service of development in the Caribbean.”
Michel in the statement said that the EU development and trade policy was “using trade to help the Caribbean countries build stronger economies that can contribute to poverty reduction.”
By helping with the creation of regional markets and the sometimes difficult adjustments these entail, he said that, “the EU was standing by the side of its Caribbean partners in their drive to adapt to the challenges of globalisation. We will help our partners to prepare new structural reforms and trade policies, adjust to the changes they bring and enhance regional integration to seize the new trade opportunities brought by the EPAs.”
According to the statement issued by the Directorate General for Trade, Mandelson and Michel will discuss with Caribbean Heads of State and ministers the next steps in their shared ambition to conclude an EPA before the end of the year. This will include key outstanding issues, including market access offers, services trade and development support, besides instructing negotiators on issues to be addressed in the coming weeks. Yesterday, the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) expressed its disappointment with last week’s decision by the EU Council to denounce the Sugar Protocol with effect from October 1, 2009. While the EU had signalled the intention to denounce the protocol, the corporation said it thought that negotiations for the EPA would be concluded first.
“The EU must know that this announcement is untimely and provokes the question whether it is negotiating in good faith and with the intention of finalizing an agreement that safeguards the benefits of the ACP-EU Sugar Protocol as required by the Cotonou Partnership Agreement.”
GuySuCo said that the mechanism that will transfer the benefits of the protocol: access, price and unlimited duration into the EPA is still to be finalised.
“The EU’s denunciation of the SP can only foster belligerence and rancour, and the council has demonstrated grave insensitivity at a crucial time”, the corporation said.
Meanwhile, the directorate yesterday also reported that Mandelson and Michel met in Brussels on September 2 with representatives of the Pacific states “to plot the way forward” in concluding an EPA for that region before the end of the year.”
The directorate said that “The two sides welcomed progress in key areas such as market access, fisheries, services trade and development support.
Ministers said that negotiators should now focus on the key outstanding issues in order to complete essential elements of agreement in the weeks ahead.” However, a Reuters report said that “The European Union and Pacific countries agreed on Tuesday to seek an interim new trade deal in order to meet an end-of-year deadline to bring their commercial ties into line with World Trade Organisation rules.”
Reuters quoted the joint declaration after a ministerial-level meeting in Brussels between the EU and the Pacific countries as saying they agreed that “in view of the short time available until the deadline of December 31, 2007, it was necessary to conclude a WTO-compatible interim agreement as a stepping stone to a comprehensive EPA.”
The countries involved in the talks included Samoa, Fiji, Tonga, Vanuatu and Tuvalu.
The interim agreement would include timetables for cutting tariffs on goods, rules of origin, safeguard mechanisms for slowing sudden surges of imports plus possibly fisheries, competition and development issues, the declaration said.
The interim deal would enter into force on January 1 and the two sides would seek a final agreement, including services, by the end of 2008.
Apart from the Caribbean and Pacific, the EU is negotiating with four regions in Africa but those talks have made less progress, EU officials say.
