The collapse of the latest round of trade talks sponsored by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is most welcome. In our case however, the horse has already bolted.
Because of a WTO ruling, the protected market and protected price for Jamaican sugar and bananas in the United Kingdom is effectively a thing of the past.
Years ago, we were told that after the launch of the European Union, Britain would no longer be able to protect trade with her former colonies. We were not told that France would never give up protecting her own farmers, nor about any other number of exceptions to the rule.
It was the United States, however, goaded by her own corporations' commercialising banana production in central America, who reported us to the WTO. American companies like Chiquita Brands (formerly United Fruit Company) said that our preferential market and price in the U.K. and Europe were unfair competition.
Whole island economies in the Caribbean are therefore now at risk because of callous American corporate greed. Big U.S. bank accounts manoeuvred through highly-paid lobbyists in Washington D. C., to vanquish the future of small farmers throughout the region. Nevertheless, the Jamaican banana continues to taste vastly superior to any Chiquita banana. We lost the case before the bar of the WTO, but now Sea Island cotton production is at risk in Africa.
More picturesque than ourselves, Sea Island cotton has attracted the interest of international non-governmental organisations which took up the case. Economic disaster may therefore not strike them as soon as it will ourselves.
Giving no second thought
When our overseas masters commanded us to deregulate our economy, we did so immediately before even putting in any anti-dumping laws. It seems Jamaica just rushes to do as she is told, without giving anything a second thought.
Certainly, there is no intellectual commitment whatsoever to protecting Jamaican farmers or manufacturers. Not a single thought is given to seeking the island's own self-interest. We are content only to follow in the slipstream of the U.S., no matter how battered we become.
The U.S. continues steadfastly to protect its own agricultural production. It subsidises and protects grain production in its own country, even tobacco farmers, and protects its steel industry with special tariffs. All they do is let in a little light Chinese manufacture and moan all day about the high dollar value of it.
In all the long years of endless rounds of trade negotiations with the WTO, that organisation has only had strength for the former colonies of Britain and Europe. There's no bite for the United States. It's one law for them, and another for us. Sadly, Britain is just rolling over.
According to another newspaper last week, Britain didn't even know the U.S. was carrying bombs to Israel on U.S. cargo flights through Scotland. The U.S. hadn't bothered to inform them of the hazardous nature of the planes' cargo.
Public indignation in the U.K. over George W. Bush addressing their prime minister as "Yo, Blair", should be but a pup to that.
When Britain fails to act as a brake on the U.S., you know that Jamaica is utterly and completely on her own. We will not survive this massive confidence trick of globalisation unless we identify very clearly where our own self-interests lie, and pursue them.
Take for example bananas. On this side of the world, Chiquita Brands buys or grows bananas in Costa Rica, Honduras, Guatemala, Panama and Ecuador. They used to be here long ago, and then the banana industry became locally owned.
UN SECURITY Council seat
Guatemala was among those countries ranged against us in our fight at the WTO for our own economic survival. Why on earth then would we vote for Guatemala over Venezuela to be given a seat on the Security Council of the United Nations? Guatemala has actively fought against us, while Venezuela gives us soft loans. From the time of the Bolivar Letter centuries ago, Jamaica has had a long history of positive associations with Venezuela.
Yet, the Leader of the Opposition Bruce Golding has warned Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller that she had better do as America wants when the time comes. He implies that Jamaica must cast its vote for Guatemala to get that seat on the U.N. Security Council, because this is what America wants.
Hugo Chavez is the president of Venezuela, a socialist firebrand ruling a country that supplies 25 per cent of the fuel to the United States. He's been to Moscow, Teheran, and virtually all the capitals which are anathema to U.S. president George W. Bush.
It doesn't matter to me who is currently the president of Venezuela. What matters is that the country has never done us harm, and actively sought to do us good. Our national interest therefore lies in supporting Venezuela over Guatemala for the U.N. Security seat.
Jamaica's foreign policy cannot be marked by a willingness to stab friends in the back, purely because a passing geopolitical game demands it.
Moreover, setting in train the destruction of small Caribbean economies by pressing the WTO to rule against our market preferences was a deeply hostile act towards us by the U.S. And all this for the sake of the financial interests of its own multinational corporations.
Quite frankly, the European Union (E.U.) is not much better. It is a piece of cheek to require that E.U. aid to the Caribbean must be regional, rather than given to individual countries. Furthermore, they say they will only negotiate with us as a region, and not as individual countries.
What hypocrisy! The E.U. itself is not a region. It remains a collection of countries going no further with unification. It doesn't even have a constitution despite over a decade of trying. It wants to dictate to us, yet it can't dictate a common currency in Europe.
France uses both euros and francs. How then can they wish to dictate to us what is in effect a merger with other Caribbean islands, when they can't even dictate that to themselves?
Already this CARICOM Single Market Economy is more trouble to Jamaica than it's worth. Only last week, our Government announced that more than 30 key, energy-saving devices will no longer attract import tariffs or GCT.
Reviewing treaties
This list does not include, however, solar water heaters. Those were blocked, the Government said, at the Caribbean Community level by Antigua/Barbuda, Barbados and Dominica, who indicated an ability to supply solar water heaters to the region.
In order to suit the national self-interest, therefore, of other islands, we are to be denied concessions on the one object that can slice the utility bill of Jamaicans. We are only to have affordable hot water when it pleases the small islands to make money out of supplying it to us.
Other than the international trade agreement which gave our bananas and sugar preferential access to the U.K. and that's now been torn up, the other treaties aren't in our self-interest. They are proving to be death certificates for small farmers and private enterprise in this country.
Prime Minister Mrs. Simpson Miller ought to review them with the utmost urgency, with a view to taking our heads out of the lion's jaws. Independence ought to mean at least as much.
