TRADE:
Caribbean Considers Wide-Ranging Deal With U.S.
Bert Wilkinson

BASSETERRE, St. Kitts, (IPS) - For the last three years or so, the 15-nation Caribbean Community has watched as powerful Latin American countries like Brazil and Venezuela successfully derailed negotiations for the U.S.-led Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) to the point where no one expects an agreement will ever be reached.

They have also watched as their neighbours in Central America abandoned their FTAA hopes and signed on to their own multilateral free trade agreement with the U.S. in the last year, mindful that Washington had no plans to back down on key issues like reducing farm subsidies to allow for an agreement favourable to the majority.

And so it is with this in mind that Caribbean leaders are now seriously contemplating asking the George. W. Bush administration to prepare for negotiations for a free trade agreement with the region in the very near future.

First announced by former Jamaican Prime Minister Percival Patterson a year ago at the St. Lucia summit of leaders, the prime ministers say that the international trade environment is changing so fast that the region will be left out in the cold if a structured agreement with its largest trading partner is not secured over the next two years.

Trade with the Caribbean has been governed since the Ronald Reagan administration in the 1980s by the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), credited by both sides with spurring trade in items ranging from clothing to petroleum products, construction materials and farm goods.

But with new World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules governing global trade, Washington has told the region in no uncertain terms that the CBI would be a thing of the past by 2008 because the preferential scheme is not necessarily WTO compatible and has to be renewed every year at the behest of more than 140 WTO members, a tough sell in a system that relies largely on unanimity.

The result is that the umbrella Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM) has completed and circulated a study to leaders and trade ministers recommending that the region goes the way of Central America in tying up an agreement with Washington since the FTAA is "on its deathbed".

"We need to have long-term security for our trade with the U.S.," said Richard Bernal, the CRNM chief. "The U.S. is our most important trading partner and we can't play around with our trade with no agreement in sight with the FTAA, and with the CBI expiring in 2008."

Bernal said the Caribbean was particularly anxious to have the FTAA because negotiators had already secured designation for the region as a special area requiring "differential treatment" because of its relatively small size, limited trade options and exposure to natural disasters like hurricanes.

The issue is slated for full discussion before the summit ends on Thursday as the CRNM wants a mandate to begin preparations for talks in the near future.

Trade between the U.S. and Caricom has topped eight billion dollars a year, with the U.S. enjoying a favourable trade deficit of more than two and a half billion dollars, much of it through food and electronic items.

The move in earnest to have a deal has also been precipitated by Bolivia's continuing objection to an application for a WTO waiver to roll over the CBI for an additional year. Bolivia says there is nothing in the preferential scheme for it and has no plans to support its continued existence. Brazil has been asked to persuade its neighbour to give the region of small island-nations a break in this regard with a mere two years left.

Meanwhile, outgoing Caricom chairman and incumbent Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Patrick Manning has urged the bloc to accept that the great powers of this world no longer have any geopolitical regard for the region compared to the Cold War era, when the Soviet Union and the U.S. fought for support, suggesting greater need to fend for itself and to negotiate new alliances.

"The world has changed. We are no longer of strategic importance and this is becoming clear in very stark ways. We see promises made being nonchalantly disregarded," he said referring to pledges of aid and other assistance.

He said the region seems to be a victim of "both our smallness and our stability", arguing that as long as the Caribbean stays quietly in a corner, threatening no one, it would continue to be left off the priority list of the developed nations.

Manning spoke on the same platform that welcomed back Haiti after a 28-month suspension in the aftermath of the overthrow of former President Jean Bertrand Aristide, and as the conference also opened its arms to Portia Simpson-Miller of Jamaica as its first woman head of government in the region since Janet Jagan of Guyana in 1997.