CARRINGTON
GEORGETOWN, Guyana (CMC):
CARIBBEAN COMMUNITY (CARICOM) governments may have made a mistake in not discussing an offer for concession fuel from Venezuela before committing themselves to the deal, a senior CARICOM official has said.
Edwin Carrington, secretary general of CARICOM, said regional governments have come to realise that the offer from President Hugo Chavez to sell oil cheaply has turned out not necessarily to be so.
He told a news conference that it would have helped governments if leaders had found the time to discuss a common regional position.
Oil-rich Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados are the only two CARICOM states that did not sign the PetroCaribe accord at a summit with Chavez in Jamaica in September, after an initial round of talks in Venezuela in late June.
FUND ESTABLISHED
Under the Caracas initiative, PDVSA, Venezuela's state-owned energy company, will supply signatories with 185,700 barrels of oil daily.
As part of the agreement, a fund has also been established for social and economic programmes, with Caracas making an initial contribution of US$50 million, while additional contributions will flow through savings from direct trade or contributions from the financed portion of oil purchases.
The Caribbean countries will also be allowed to defer payments for 30 per cent of their imports for 15 years at an interest rate of two per cent per year, and if oil goes above US$50 per barrel, the interest rate will fall to one per cent per year, with payment for 40 per cent of the imports being spread over 25 years.
But Carrington told reporters at his annual end-of-year news conference that there had been no discussions among regional leaders so as to provide a unified response to the initiative.
"The sad thing was that there was no regional discussion among us as to how we would respond to this initiative," he said. "That was really the weakness. The fact that we did not sit and discuss and work out a harmonised approach on how to deal with it was really the weakness," Carrington said.
