‘We are working on several fronts’ – President Bharrat Jagdeo
GUYANA is among key members of the 79-nation African, Caribbean, Pacific (ACP) group leading a continuing battle for a better long-term trade deal with Europe.

“We are working on several fronts to ensure that the region’s (Caribbean) and Guyana’s interests are protected”, President Bharrat Jagdeo told the Guyana Chronicle by telephone yesterday. He was due back home last night from several official visits, including to China.

ACP nations at a summit that ended Friday in the Ghana capital, Accra, urged Europe to stop pressuring the states to sign individual trade deals and allow more time for the group to agree a common negotiating platform.

President Jagdeo was not at the Accra summit and Foreign Affairs Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett led this country’s delegation at the talks.

A declaration from the summit by ACP leaders calls for undisrupted trade access to the European Union market, Mauritius’s Foreign Affairs Minister Arvin Boolell told Reuters news agency, citing a draft of the document.

The ACP group, which represents 300 million people and includes some of the world’s least developed nations, has been struggling to maintain a united front in the face of pressure from Brussels to sign Economic Partnership Agreements (EPA).

The EU says the accords are needed to make its long-running preferential trade arrangements with the ACP compliant with World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules, and many of the developing group’s members, fearing exclusion from the European market, have signed interim deals.

But ACP leaders say this has fractured the unity of developing countries and weakened their ability as a bloc to negotiate better terms of trade for their often vulnerable, commodity-exporting economies.

Guyana is the lone member of the 15-nation Caribbean Community (CARICOM) that has not agreed to sign the EPA under pressure from the EU, arguing that this has serious long-term implications.

“There is a common feature to the ongoing debate — that solidarity of ACP should not be undermined. The EPA seems to have created division and diversion rather than convergence,” Boolell told Reuters.

“It is not simply because we export mostly to the EU that we should feel we are cornered,” Boolell added. The ACP nations send more than a quarter of what they export to the EU.

ACP economies, already squeezed by high food and fuel prices, are now facing the risk of reduced aid and investment from the developed world, as a result of its banking crisis.

Outgoing ACP chairman President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan on Thursday accused rich countries of using “blackmail” to bully poor states into accepting bad terms of trade.

Bashir, who faces a possible International Criminal Court (ICC) indictment for war crimes in Sudan’s Darfur, left the summit on Thursday last without waiting for its conclusion. He handed the ACP chairmanship to Ghanaian President John Kufuor.

TROIKA TO LEAD LOBBY
Boolell said a high-level mission of ACP leaders would travel to Europe to lobby for more time for a convergent solution between the two groups on the trade question.

“In between…summits, we need a troika that will convey the message loud and clear,” he said.

That troika would begin its mission by the end of October, Kufuor said.

Its negotiations may delay the signing of a trade agreement between CARICOM and the EU, which is scheduled for Oct. 15, CARICOM Secretary General Edwin Carrington said. The CARICOM deal has already slipped from an earlier target date of June 30.

Glenys Kinnock, a member of the European Parliament and co-president of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, said both developing and developed countries were facing “a perfect storm of ecological, financial and social pressures”.

Reflecting criticism from within the European Parliament, Kinnock called the EPAs “messy, confused and contradictory to the numerous commitments to trade justice made by the EU”.

She criticised the European Commission’s approach to the trade deals, saying it viewed them as free trade agreements aimed at opening markets, rather than as development tools.

EU Aid Commissioner Louis Michel defended the EPAs.

“I remain deeply convinced that these agreements will allow our development partners to take full advantage of the positive effects of globalisation,” he told a closed meeting session in a prepared paper seen by Reuters.

Anti-poverty and fair trade campaigners have said that unless the ACP can find a strong unified negotiating position, it risks losing relevance in international relations.