Ian McDonald
I NOTE, with a grim smile, that at the 35th Board of Governors Meeting of the Caribbean Development Bank in Georgetown recently the European Investment Bank magnanimously announced a loan of 40 million euros to the CDB amid applause and congratulations all around. It seems to have been a veritable feast of love with the European Investment Bank representative basking in the glory of "open expressions of appreciation."
This is absurd and even obscene. The European Union (EU) right now is preparing to remove a huge amount more than a 40 million euros loan from the trading revenue of CARICOM countries. Instead of applauding we should be expressing outrage. I know that in medieval times the executioner with the axe was forgiven and even blessed by the condemned man on the block but in this day and age do we really have to be so deferential?
What should be given prominence in the media here and abroad are the latest proposals by the EU to reduce the price paid for the sugar we supply under the Sugar Protocol by 43 per cent in two years starting with a 28 per cent cut in 2007. Such a reduction would cancel all the loans and grants the EU has contributed to CARICOM in the last few years. What they give with one hand with much public trumpeting they quietly take away with the other. This should be exposed.
A 43 per cent reduction in the Sugar Protocol price amounts to a loss to CARICOM of well over US$100 million per annum. Why are we applauding a one-off loan of 40 million euros from the EU when the EU is proposing to take away permanently from CARICOM a sum of over US$100 million annually?
Over the last few years the European Union has systematically betrayed CARICOM banana producers, rum producers and rice producers. We are a courteous and friendly people and have therefore been reluctant to use the word betrayal, but betrayal it has been. We have trusted the EU to defend the interests of producers vital to our economic well-being and the EU has betrayed that trust, all the while mouthing pious platitudes of deep concern.
The EU has been immensely adept at explaining why in the greater globalised scheme of things trading arrangements on which our developing economies depend have to be drastically reduced in value. They have then been equally adept in diluting and delaying the totally inadequate funding which has been offered as sops in place of the really valuable trading arrangements which are being removed. It is a sorry tale of selfishness, hypocrisy, bureaucratic inertia and, yes, betrayal.
BEGAN A FEW YEARS AGO
Now the EU is getting ready to deal with CARICOM, and other ACP sugar producers in the same way. Actually the betrayal in sugar begun a few years ago when through its unilaterally imposed EBA initiative the EU signalled the removal of 100,000 tonnes of access for CARICOM countries through the Special Preferential Sugar agreement to give to LDCs, thus "taking from the poor to give to the poorest" while leaving the rich EU completely unscathed. What a scam! And all protests were met with silence as if our just arguments were not worth a reply. What insufferable arrogance! And so it was that trade valued at US$30 million annually was quietly removed from CARICOM.
CHOKING THE YEAR
Further betrayal is now choking the air. Again we will be called upon to suffer, and even die, for the greater good of the EU's selfish interest in concluding a deal in the current international trade talks named, ironically, the Doha Development Round of negotiations.
The ACP countries, including CARICOM, have pointed out in the repeated representations they have been making for the past year that our sugar industries are not against reform of the EU sugar regime, and are pursuing strategies of adaptation to change, but that the EU's proposed price cuts are too drastic and too sudden and need to be introduced over a transitional period of eight years. These carefully argued representations have been treated with contempt and the EU Commission is now proposing even more savage price cuts than previously.
Ian McDonald is an occasional contributor who lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.
