A MONTH from this week Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community will be meeting in Port-of-Spain for their regular annual summit. They will have much to reflect on, including the just concluded rounds of informal meetings in Trinidad and Tobago with US Vice-President Joseph Biden and China’s President Xi Jingping.

The final agenda for the summit is yet to be settled, but immediate pressing issues requiring serious decisions for action would include regional air transportation; the crime epidemic and the future of the region’s sugar trade with the European Union (EU).
The last issue is the focus of this editorial and revolves around a challenging warning from the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of states in which this region, as a principal initiator in its formation, remains a very committed partner.
The warning, as signaled late last month by the Secretariat of the 79-member ACP, is that the economies of its sugar exporting member states are facing “immense danger” as a consequence of threatened refusal by countries of the European Union (EU) to abolish the prevailing sugar quotas system before 2020.
In a letter last week to the current chairman of the EU Council of Agriculture, Simon Coveney, chairman of the ACP’s Sub-committee on Sugar, Dr Patrick Gomes, stressed  the ACP’s grave concerns of the EU moving to abolish the sugar quotas system in 2015—five years than earlier expected.
Gomes, (Guyana’s Brussels-based envoy to the EU), in referencing a report last December from the European Commission Services on Prospects for Agricultural Markets and Income in the EU 2012-22, said that the expiry of sugar quotas in 2015 would lead to a reduction of the domestic sugar price in the EU.
The fear  of the ACP’s sugar exporting countries, that include CARICOM members, is that such a reduction in domestic sugar price would result in a sharp decline in imports by more than fifty percent over a ten-year period, from 3.5 million tonnes in 2012 to 1.5 million tonnes by 2022.
In pleading the ACP’s case for objective understanding of the social and economic consequences, which he feels cannot be beyond the capacity of the EU decision-makers to avoid, Gomes said:
“The damage to our sugar industries and, more widely, to our economies will be immense. This would seriously undermine and call into question the coherence of EU prices and, inevitably, the very basis of our long standing partnership and the fundamental interests that bind us will be considerably weakened…”
In contrast, as the ACP has also noted, the United States is currently examining its farm bill with the intention to roll over the current sugar programme with quota-based imports covering some fifteen percent of its needs.
This policy essentially guarantees continued access to the United States market from developing and least developed countries. Let’s hope the EU decision-makers are earnestly listening and are open to objective reasoning.
*(Courtesy yesterday’s Barbados Daily Nation)