I would like to welcome the Africa, Caribbean and the Pacific (ACP) conference participants to Guyana. The 11th Special ACP Ministerial Conference on sugar commenced on May 18, 2009 and will conclude on May 21, 2009. The Conference will focus on the terms and conditions for a new sugar arrangement, especially as the ACP-EU Sugar Protocol for Fiji reaches the endpoint on September 30, 2009; other foci may be to review implications of the global credit crunch on sugar in ACP countries on these areas: productivity at both factory and field levels; expanding into ethanol and electricity generation; and facilitating workers without jobs in the restructuring of the sugar industry. But I want o spend time in this letter to focus on the politics of EU’s dominance over the ACP.

It was in 1996, through its Green Paper, that the European Union (EU) started to send vibes to the ACP group that its interest in retaining the one-way preferential arrangement had reached the zero point; and through these vibes, the EU demonstrated great proclivity to not only abandon the preferential arrangement implemented through the Lome Conventions, but to institute in its place the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), conceived through the infamous Green Paper.

The Lome Conventions were fine, so long as the ACP could realise the EU’s interests; and the European Commissioner Professor João de Deus Pinheiro in 1996 made it clear that the ACP group was not a priority for the EU anymore. And so it is useful for us to understand that the EPA was not a mechanism to safeguard ACP’s interests, but the interests of the EU.

But under what context did the EU downgrade the importance of the ACP group; here are the then European Commissioner Professor João de Deus Pinheiro’s implied explanations, as outlined by Kelsey: (1) the end of the Cold War meant that Europe no longer had to compete with the former Soviet Union, in order to sustain its influence among poor nations; (2) political changes in Eastern Europe threw up new priorities and expectations for the EU; (3) in the 1990s, the Asian Tiger economies were really the new driving force for the global economy, and the EU had minimum influence in Asia; (4) the EU could then purchase raw materials elsewhere at a cheaper price than what the ACP offered; (5) the emergence of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 practically destroyed the Lome Convention’s Banana Protocol, as the EU could no longer veto decisions made in favor of the U.S. and Latin America’s complaints under GATT’s rules.

In the EU’s eyes, therefore, the world was different and the ACP no longer had any place of importance. However, let’s remind ourselves that the ACP was established in 1975 through the Georgetown Agreement when the Lome I kicked in. And the ACP negotiated with a unified voice whenever there was a review of the Lome Conventions. The ACP applied vigorous pressures to the European Union between Lome Conventions. And when the World Trade Organization (WTO) fast-tracked the neoliberal globalization scene, the ACP exerted enormous pressure to make its voice heard; the ACP’s pressure group tactic was clearly observed during the WTO Ministerial Meeting in Cancun, Mexico in 2003, when the ACP took on the European Commission on certain issues as, investment; competition policy; trade facilitation; and transparency in government procurement. This line of thinking may have pushed Professor Kelsey to suggest that the EPA proposals were intended to destroy the solidarity of the ACP.

And so it must have been ominous when the European Union proposed EPA negotiations, not through the usual unified ACP countries, but through different and separate geographical negotiations. The ACP then was and now is definitively nonessential to the EU. But today, the EPA, a done deal for the CARIFORUM, will soon engulf the remaining parts of the ACP!
PREM MISIR