THERE CAN be no doubt about Ms. Berthia Parle's passion for the Caribbean's tourism industry, which she again highlighted in her speech last week in Montego Bay at the annual conference of the Jamaica Hotel and Tourist Association.
But while Ms. Parle, the president of the Caribbean Hotel Association, generated much heat in her denunciation of the quality of the region's trade negotiators at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in Geneva, we hardly believe that she brought much light to the issue or that her intervention added anything to our understanding of the matters facing countries like those in the Caribbean at the WTO.
The core of Ms. Parle's argument, as we understand it, is that no one with high expertise in tourism is among the Caribbean diplomats based in Geneva or is on the full-time staff of the Regional Negotiating Machinery (RNM), the body headed by Jamaica's Richard Bernal which leads the Caribbean Community's external trade negotiations. But we would have expected that someone in Ms Parle's position would have presented a more substantive and nuanced argument rather than, as some will interpret it, merely impugning the skills and competence of Caribbean trade negotiators in Geneva and the people who support them at home.
It would have been true to argue that the RNM and the region's Geneva staff can always use more high level technical officers, given the complex analyses required in the WTO negotiations. But it is a travesty to suggest that someone with, for instance, the recognised expertise of Ambassador Ransford Smith, has stumbled and bumbled his way through the Doha Round.
It makes nonsense of the facts to argue too that regional negotiators have remained 'in the banana mode' and that they assume that 'their major role is to attend cocktail receptions' when the truth is that regional negotiators have argued pellucidly for the shaping of a fair deal in the shaping of an agreement on trade in services. Moreover, Dr. Bernal is among the leading experts on the concepts about special and differential treatment for small island states and has played key roles in stopping the United States and Europe ramrodding their positions past developing countries at previous WTO sessions. In the event, bananas, per se, is not a specific subject of the Doha negotiations, although it would be touched on in the negotiations on trade in agricultural products.
The bottom line, though, is that Ms. Parle owes the hard-working staff at the RNM and the negotiators in Geneva an apology and a recasting of her approach to the trade talks in which the region is now engaged. For it is state parties which negotiate multilateral agreements, and to reject the efforts of public sector officials, is, quite frankly, nonsense.
Ms. Parle, to be effective, and of relevance, should actively engage the agencies responsible for the region's negotiations and point out the perceived areas of weakness and the intellectual concepts that need to be addressed. Soap boxes can be exceedingly slippery places, especially when those who mount them have not properly grounded themselves in facts. This, we hope, will not happen to Ms. Parle.
THE OPINIONS ON THIS PAGE, EXCEPT FOR THE ABOVE, DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE VIEWS OF THE GLEANER.
