IN A little over two weeks time the European Commission will recommend the amount that it will make available to support the restructuring of the ACP sugar sector in all 18 sugar protocol nations. Last November the European Commission's Trade and Agriculture Commissioners promised the ACP the sum of ¤190 million (J$15 billion) per annum over a 10 year period. Now that the World Trade Organisation's trade ministerial meeting is over and the political pressure is off, reports from Brussels suggest that this figure has fallen to around ¤116m (J$9.14 billion) per annum initially rising over 10 years to no more than ¤149m (J$11.75 billion) per annum. This has come about as a result of an intense internal debate within Europe about the need to cut its external budgets by 20.4 per cent.
Despite the hugely damaging impact on Caribbean sugar-producing economies that inadequate compensation will have, the Caribbean is silent on the issue. Since last November's decision to cut sugar prices, the fate of many hundreds of thousands of workers in Jamaica, Guyana and elsewhere has been the subject of continuous discussion by Brussels bureaucrats and their often-opinionated representatives in the Caribbean. But in the region the matter has been addressed as if it were an administrative exercise rather than the final political battle over sugar. There has been no lobbying, no ministerial mission, no letter. The diaspora is silent. It is as if the Caribbean sugar-producing states have chosen to sleepwalk to disaster.
Jamaica's sugar strategy indicates that it needs ¤44.1 million (J$3.48 billion) in the first year of transition, and ¤555.7 million (J$43.81 billion) in all over a 10-year period. It argues that such support must be front-loaded if it and other ACP sugar producers are to be able to survive the effect of a 36 per cent price cut over three years starting in 2007. Yet Europe's member-states and members of the European Parliament are not being asked difficult questions about where this money is coming from and when. European Commissioners are not being held to account for their spin. They are not being told about the inequity and immorality of a system that helps wealthy farmers in Europe but through less than adequate compensation will destroy
livelihoods, social stability and security in poorer nations once regarded as friends.
Last year Caribbean ministers fought a battle over price that they could not win. This year when Brussels is discussing issues that affect directly and indirectly almost every household in Jamaica and the region, Caribbean governments have not even made known their concerns to those who will determine the outcome.
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