President Bharrat Jagdeo is now internationally accepted and is a force to be reckoned with in international relations, especially in areas such as climate change; reforming the International Financial Institutions (IFIs); a peerless advocate for the poor and vulnerable countries; recipient of honorary degrees, inter alia. All of these portend well for Guyana’s democratic development and a better life for all Guyanese. And in the context of Jagdeo’s contribution to international relations, I was asked to re-run this piece that I wrote last year.
IN THE NEXT few days, on November 26, the UNASUR Summit in Guyana will be history in the making, as Guyana, the only English-speaking country on the South American continent, leads the way for consolidating a unified South America; that is, the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR).
The Guyana Summit on November 26 has momentous historical significance. On that day, Quito will relinquish the UNASUR Presidency to Guyana, where it will be the celebrated task of President Bharrat Jagdeo to lead UNASUR on to the next milestone.
The Guyana Summit will probably mull the next Secretary-General. With the sudden demise of former Argentina President Nestor Kirschner, the first UNASUR Secretary-General, there is some speculation that Brazil’s President ‘Lula’ da Silva, who relinquishes office next January, and former Uruguay President, Tabaré Vázquez, may be probable contenders; but the strong likelihood is that there will be other candidates for this prestigious position.
The Guyana Summit will also probably witness the legal consummation of UNASUR, through the mandatory ninth country’s ratification of the Treaty.
Next week, Guyana sets the stage for carving UNASUR’s agenda for the next year. The UNASUR Summit in Guyana will occur amid the persisting U.S. economic woes that continue to damage the credibility and capacity of the Washington Consensus. And this declining influence of the Washington Consensus may provide the impetus for UNASUR to seek out a new trading paradigm.
And we should see a trading paradigm of this nature against the background of a slow-growth patch within the U.S. and the European Union (EU), while the developing world’s economic growth rate is expected to grow at a faster rate. Better economic growth rates within the developing world will provide an impetus for its low and middle-income countries to birth more collaboration and integration with each other.
Over the years, there were several such overtures to effect an Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN)-UNASUR cooperation to boost their economic growth and reduce some misery arising from a sustained global financial stagnation. Both trading blocs have enormous capacity. ASEAN carries a population of 580 million, with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of US$1.8 trillion; the expectation is that by 2015, ASEAN will have 625 million people with a GDP of US$2.69 trillion.     The Latin American countries have 580 million people with a GDP of  US$5.6 trillion, and with an expected 4% growth rate in 2011. And recently, there was a 1.6% to 5% economic growth rate increase.     ASEAN-UNASUR could work toward both regional and bilateral cooperation, vis-à-vis high-level heads of state and private sector heads’ interface, and enhanced economic, financial, energy, technology transfer, trade, investment, education, culture, and health collaboration.
The Guyana UNASUR Summit has to be cognizant of the Mercosur-EU trade talks scheduled for early December in Brasilia, Brazil, if only for the reason that it is an economic integration movement that has two of the most powerful economies in South America: Brazil and Argentina. For these reasons, we should be mindful as to the reasons for Mercosur’s establishment, in order to understand the Mercosur-EU stalemated relationship.
Mercosur was set up in 1991 by the Treaty of Asunción, and given an international scope through the Treaty of Ouro Preto in 1994. The idea behind Mercosur is to eventually have a free movement of people, capital, goods, and services in the member states; but this is far from being a ‘done’ deal, as these States are mired in trade disputes.
And then, since 1999, the two trading blocs Mercosur-EU wanted to establish a free-trade area; it is still on the wish list after all these years, because of the mutual, high risks involved. Mercosur, comprising Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay, persists in expressing concerns about the EU’s industrial exports and services devastating South America’s up-and-coming manufacturing base, and the EU’s concerns about South America’s cheap agricultural products and services with the potential to ravage agriculture in France and Ireland. The answer to this dilemma is UNASUR’s formulation of an industrial policy that is technology-led and export-led.
Of interest, too, to the Guyana Summit could be the International Financial Institutions (IFIs).The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are inappropriate models for the developing world, where the focus of these models is on market liberalization and stabilization; market liberalization and stagnation continue to sustain the developing world’s dependence on the two international financial institutions (IFIs) and the Washington Consensus; a position fully underscored by Jeffrey Sachs. Under these circumstances, not only industrial policy formulation becomes problematic, but also regional integration.
For these reasons, an even greater achievement at the Guyana Summit could be agreeing on a framework to develop an industrial policy for UNASUR. In the Guyana context, it is doubly important to sculpt an industrial policy for Guyana, vis-à-vis the EU-CARIFORUM‘s Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) for sugar, but a policy that flows from an overall UNASUR industrial policy.
At the Cochabamba Summit in 2006, Heads of State demanded better continental solidarity to realize closer economic and political ties, and to expand continent-wide trading, in order to combat the deepening asymmetries among nations. Guyana at this week’s Summit will have to press its demands for greater trading incursions into South America, and this type of call is quite in the spirit of the 2006 Cochabamba Declaration.
And again at the Cochabamba Summit in 2006, President Jagdeo, in several engagements with his colleague heads of state charted his mission and programmes for Guyana’s development, and Guyana’s place in the emerging continental solidarity. Jagdeo explained that Guyana, strategically located between Venezuela and Brazil, has to be a prime target for physical infrastructural development in the South American integration process, with the potential to stimulate and marshal considerable prime infrastructural investments for Guyana.
UNASUR is important for Guyana, and President Jagdeo renewed that dialogue on infrastructural investments way back in Cochabamba in 2006; and that dialogue, inclusive of other developmental matters, is expected to continue at the Guyana Summit. (Previously published in the November 21, 2010 edition of the Sunday Chronicle)