LULLED BY SUGAR PROTOCOL OF EU’S LOME CONVENTION

Leaders of several of the Caribbean countries which were signatories to the ACP-EEC [now EU — European Union] Convention of Lome are being painfully naive if they believe, as governments of European nations once encouraged them to, that the Convention’s Sugar Protocol is of indefinite duration and can only be changed by mutual agreement.

Admittedly, Article One of the Sugar Protocol, Protocol No 3, declares pompously that "the Community undertakes for an indefinite period to purchase and import, at guaranteed prices, specific quantities of cane sugar, raw or white, which originate in the ACP States and which these States undertake to deliver to it." In turn, Chapter Two of Article Three of the Sugar Protocol does indeed state that "Subject to Article 7, these quantities {stipulated in the Protocol} cannot be reduced without the consent of the individual States concerned."

Nonetheless, the European Union has advanced the argument today of having to respect the position adopted by the World Trade Organisation [WTO] with respect to preferential entry quotas, and this is understandable.

Interestingly, the European Union, though, had earlier challenged the United States of America on the issue of US objection to preferential entry of Caribbean bananas to the EU. An agreement was later worked out with the US, whose interest in the matter, had been dictated by American investor concerns re the banana industry in Central American States — Chiquita, United Fruit and Dole, among others.

The European Union, though, was not prepared to conduct a similar battle for Caribbean sugar, this time directly with the WTO, Sugar Protocol or no Sugar Protocol, indefinite duration or no indefinite duration.

Caribbean leaders, however, who have held on to the so-called spirit of the Protocol, should have understood that in matters of establishing rules and regulations for international trade, the decisions of the World Trade Organisation are final. Meanwhile, because I would be accused of being cynical should I point out that nations of Western Europe are principals of the WTO, I shall not do so. But what has appeared to have "confuffled" several of the Caribbean leaders has been that there has been no official change to the Sugar Protocol "by mutual agreement".

A pre-condition by the United Kingdom for its entry in 1974 into the then European Economic Community was that the same measure of protection afforded Caribbean and Commonwealth sugar under the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement would be afforded under the Convention of Lome, which would later be signed on February 28 of the following year. And the Sugar Protocol was indeed guided by this. I wish to make clear at this stage that whenever I have spoken or shall speak of signatories to the Convention of Lome I am in no way referring to individual ministers, who signed on behalf of their respective nations, but rather the nations themselves.

A point worth noting is that most of the Caribbean States which are part of the Convention of Lome concept had, at the time, been experiencing financial difficulties, including foreign exchange problems, both as a result of the after effects of economic de-stimulation as colonies and the then relatively recent upward surge in international crude oil prices. Had the United Kingdom not sought the inclusion of the Sugar Protocol, an act, which incidentally, protected British investments in sugar in her former colonies, there would have been the somewhat uncomfortable possibility of social dislocation through the closure of sugar plantations.

In fact, when in 1975, the year the first Convention of Lome was signed, late Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister, Dr Eric Williams took the policy decision to acquire Caroni Limited, because its then owners, Tate and Lyle, were about to shut it down, he saved not only the immediate jobs of several thousand workers but staved off possible social unrest. In this situation, it is not difficult to understand why many Caribbean sugar producing exporting countries, including Jamaica, Barbados, Guyana, St Kitts, Belize and Trinidad and Tobago should have embraced, eagerly, the Sugar Protocol of the Convention of Lome.

If I may be allowed to use a cliche, the Sugar Protocol, indeed the entire 1975 Convention of Lome, flattered to deceive. The very first section of the body of the Convention — "Trade Co-operation," Title One, Article One [Page 25], speaks somewhat disarmingly of: "The object of this Convention is to promote trade between the Contracting Parties." Never mind that it went on immediately to be disturbingly patronising when it stated: "... taking account of their respective levels of development, and, in particular, of the need to secure additional benefits for the trade of ACP States, in order to accelerate the rate of growth of their trade and improve the conditions of access of their products to the market of the European Economic Community, so as to ensure a better balance of trade in the Contracting Parties."

While, it is understandable that many Third World leaders anxious for the retention and/or expansion of sugar exporting levels and with this the retention of jobs and the guarantees of revenues would have accepted this dismissively patronising nonsense, it, nevertheless grates. But as my Uncle Fitz, late of Church Village, St Philip, Barbados used to say: "You cannot hold your hand out and your head up at the same time."

They, the leaders, should have sought to have made a determined move from commodities to products, to have a bankable work force in each member state as well as to diversify the economies of their respective countries. Only Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Jamaica consciously moved out of the valley of indecision, although Jamaica would stumble along the way. Instead most of them remain prisoners of the hobbled thinking of their colonial past.