AFTER THREE brief ministerial meetings over the past year, several Caribbean countries, including Jamaica, have agreed with Venezuela to create PetroCaribe, a regional energy agency that intends to offer guaranteed access and prices for petroleum.
For countries like Jamaica, facing an oil import bill of over $1 billion per year, and rising rapidly with continuing increases in global crude prices, such an offer is not to be quickly dismissed.
However, Mr Patterson and his colleague leaders who have hastily signed the PetroCaribe agreement should be asking some questions. These include a fundamental one about President Chavez's plans for the new agency. By the president's own admission, PetroCaribe is a small part of a wider plan to create PetroAmerica - a holding company for all state-owned energy producers in Latin America and the Caribbean.
PetroCaribe and PetroAmerica are central to Mr. Chavez's plan for the Bolivarian Alternative Trade Pact that the Venezuelan leader sees as the counter to the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, which he considers to be a tool of the United States to control the Americas. The Bolivarian Alternative is a weapon in his ideological war with Washington.
Even if they see no cause for questioning Mr. Chavez's wider plans, Caribbean leaders must have doubts about the ability of Venezuela's increasingly striated economy to support such largesse. This is fundamental, even with the lack of clarity about whether PetroCaribe will replace or expand earlier energy programmes, such as the San José Accord of 1980 and the Caracas Energy Agreement of 2000.
The examination of the initiative should include the likely impact on current energy programmes in the region. Mr. Patrick Manning, the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, has not signed. He is involved in current and contentious negotiations with Venezuela about exploiting oil and gas deposits that straddle Trinidad and Tobago's maritime border with Venezuela. Equally, he is concerned about the political impact of a pact with Venezuela on his country's energy market in the U.S. Trinidad and Tobago supplies 70 per cent of the U.S.' global imports of liquefied natural gas.
The Caribbean examination must also determine whether the region is forgoing Trinidad and Tobago's own regional energy facility which, according to Mr. Manning, is growing at US$25 million per month.
We suggest that while PetroCaribe may not be without merit, our hasty leaders should consider whether agreement for PetroCaribe, which implies support for the Bolivarian Alternative, means that Mr. Patterson and his colleagues agree with Mr. Chavez that the Free Trade Area of the Americas is dead?
Sometimes it is wise to look a gift horse in the mouth.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
