The Caricom Heads of Government will be meeting in Guyana this week, July 4 to 6. From the comments made by several country leaders and the Secretary General of the regional body, it is clear there was no plan drafted to deal with the possibility of Britain exiting the EU. Whether the said leaders believed the “stay” votes would carry the day over the “leave” votes, there is no excuse for a contingency plan – or even a position paper – not to have been drafted on the possibility.
And this perpetual lack of anticipation of threats and opportunities facing the region by the body is one of the primary reasons that most citizens of these 15-member states who bother to think about the issue, conclude that Caricom has long passed its expiration date. But the sloth in reaction is not confined to anticipation: it extends to reaction and even implementation of plans agreed to.
Take the financial crisis in 2008 that engulfed the developed economies, primarily the US and the EU. While even those countries were caught flat footed, Caricom subsequently made several attempts to craft a coherent response for the region, none of which ever came to fruition. Consequently, our response has been ad hoc and “reactionary” in all senses of the word, and has left most of the territories with their economies still on the ropes.
On plans left to die on the vine, the “Jagdeo Initiative” which was launched since 2002, comes to mind. After complaining since its formation 43 years ago about Caricom’s “huge food importation bill” and watching it grow annually, the eponymously named plan proposed by the then President of Guyana identified eight constraints to making the region self-sufficient in food, and even transforming it into an food exporting area.
Guyana offered the region use of its vast agricultural land at nominal costs as its contribution but the plan died stillborn. The region’s food bill has now ballooned to over US$4 billion and more handwringing will be witnessed this week.
From our standpoint, with sugar being our major agricultural crop, the Caricom Regional Negotiating Machinery failed us miserably when they dawdled after 2003 to initiate negotiations to have our Demerara Brown Sugar receive the Geographical Indications (GI) certification. Like, say, Burgundy it would have been tied to the region from which it was produced and other countries such as Mauritius would have been prevented from using the name “Demerara Brown Sugar” for their substandard products.
Notwithstanding their protestations, Brexit will be the ignored elephant in the room rather than being on the formal agenda for this HoG meeting. Guyana cannot afford to also bury its head in the sand on this issue.
As was pointed in an earlier editorial, “Brexit and Sugar”, now that Britain will have to renegotiate all of its trade linkages presently handled by the EU, Guyana has an opportunity to secure a potentially lucrative market in a Free Trade Agreement with that country.
The focus of the EU in all the sugar regimes it crafted has been to protect its beet sugar industry by providing it with huge subsidies. In the meantime our sugar which had been shipped to Britain to Tate & Lyle Sugar (TLS) on the Thames for refining was incorporated into the EU regime in 1973 and modified accordingly in the following years.
Cane Sugar has been treated as the stepchild and TLS has seen its refineries gradually decreased from six to one. And even that single refinery is only operating at 59% of its 1.1 million tonnes capacity.
Because beet farming in Britain has never been on a scale as say France and Germany, and British farmers never received subsidies on the scale of their European counterparts, the British government will not be faced with the same level of pressure when they negotiate new Free Trade Agreements (FTAs) in cane sugar.
Guyana must seize this opportunity and not wait for Caricom to bury it.
