A gathering of European Union (EU), Jamaican and other Caribbean diplomats and representatives gathered yesterday at the Jamaica Conference Centre, downtown Kingston, for the launch of negotiations for an economic partnership between the EU and the Caribbean.
-Ian Allen photo
Earl Moxam, Senior Gleaner Writer
AN INTENSIVE period of negotiations geared towards fashioning an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between CARIFORUM states (CARICOM and the Dominican Republic) and the European Union (EU), got under way at the Jamaica Conference Centre in Kingston yesterday.
Scheduled to be completed by January 2008, this and other regional EPAs should be in keeping with the broad framework of the 2000 Cotonou Agreement between the EU and the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) States, but with features tailored to meet the requirements of the particular regions.
BENCHMARKS FOR PROGRESS
Foreign Minister Dame Billie Miller of Barbados, who has lead ministerial responsibility for the negotiations on the part of CARIFORUM, laid out three main benchmarks for progress on the part of the region: "Reduction of vulnerability while facilitating sustainable development; enhanced structural transformation of our economies; and international competitiveness and export diversification".
She highlighted as well escalating security threats, characterising this factor as "the newest non-tariff barrier" to threaten vulnerable states.
Pascal Lamey, EU Trade Commis-sioner, gave his Caribbean counterparts high marks for the expansion of CARICOM to include Suriname and Haiti and for the ongoing economic integration through the CARICOM Single Market & Economy (CSME), and free trade talks with the Dominican Republic.
That process, he said, was crucial to achieving some of the goals set out by Ms. Miller, and in keeping with some of the features anticipated in the EPA, to be negotiated.
The EPAs, he said, would adopt a comprehensive approach to trade and development, in keeping with the objectives set out in the Cotonou Agreement, and would seek to build on each region's own integration initiative, such as the CSME.
Prime Minister P.J. Patterson served notice, however, that the Caribbean would be pressing for fundamental improvements in the mechanisms governing the EU/ACP partnership.
FALLEN SHORT
As one of the architects of the Lome Conventions, which eventually gave way to Cotonou, Mr. Patterson acknowledged that, as helpful as they had been to the economies of ACP states, the Lome pacts had fallen short "as vehicles for stimulating growth and development and boosting new exports".
Furthermore, he complained, even those preferences, such as the Sugar Protocol, which were originally intended to have lasted in perpetuity, were now threatened under the rules of the World Trade Organisation (WTO).
With the largely untested young Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerritt of Dominica by his side, Mr. Patterson warned that Dominica's banana industry is substantially undermined by new WTO market access rules, and that that tiny country "is faced with virtual extinction".
That warning came against the well-documented challenge to the EU/ACP banana regime, led by some Central American producers, backed by major American corporations.
"Any new economic partnership agreements must seek to establish asymmetrical trade arrangements which recognise the differences in development and size of economies," he urged.
