This Week in Europe, 4 February 2000
Executive Director of the Caribbean Council for Europe
The post Lomé negotiations are complete. Late on the evening Thursday February 3, the final contentious aspects of the post-2000 EU/ACP arrangement were resolved. As a result the new agreement to replace the Lomé Convention, will be signed in Fiji, most probably in May. It will, quite literally, change the Caribbean’s history and over time, alter forever the relationship between former colonies and the metropolitan powers.
The new agreement – to be known as a partnership arrangement – between the European Union (EU) and the 71 African Caribbean and Pacific states deals with the whole spread of relations with Europe. In part it places great emphasis on the delivery of development through the private sector and contains a range of new funding provisions, which will create a more substantial role for enterprise in national and regional development. Beyond this the new agreement contains many beneficial new arrangements of direct relevance to the Caribbean. For example, there are special declarations of support for rum and rice, the extension of the existing sugar protocol, a new banana protocol and language on tourism.
It is a remarkable achievement and a testament to the dedication and intellectual rigour of those who negotiated and advised. The Caribbean’s role and that of Mauritius was central to the success of the negotiations. So much so that there is a begrudging view among some EU negotiators that if the Jamaican Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Anthony Hylton, in particular, had not been the senior ACP Trade negotiator, then the ACP would not have achieved the sophisticated language on transitional arrangements or market access that the final agreement now contains.
At its heart, the new post Lomé arrangement will determine how ACP states give up, over time, their preferential trade arrangements with Europe and substitute structures based on World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules. This will take eight years. During this time, known as the transitional period, further negotiations, probably on a region-specific basis, will determine how in the succeeding seven years something close to two-way free trade arrangement with Europe will be created. The significance of these arrangements goes beyond the EU. The agreement will inform the negotiations for a changed relationship with the Americas. What has been agreed in Brussels has the effect of pre-conditioning a significant part of the content and time scale for inclusion of any agreement the Caribbean reaches on future participation in the Free Trade Area of the Americas.
It is fair to note that there are some in the ACP who doubt the wisdom of what has been agreed in Brussels. They remain critical of the arrangements for the preparatory and transitional period, but it is far from clear what viable alternatives were available. The tone and content of these negotiations was very different from any previous negotiation with Europe. Originally Europe needed the ACP. It was an important source of commodities and food during the post war period of East-West tension. Today all of this has changed. What made these negotiations different was the unseen presence of the EC’s Trade Directorate and the WTO whose shadow fell across all trade discussions. So much so that some key issues had to be resolved outside of the negotiations through bilateral meetings in Seattle, Brussels and elsewhere as a result of which the EC’s Trade Commissioner, Pascal Lamy, was able to ensure vital accommodations could be achieved.
The new arrangement will be a partnership arrangement but anyone who was present at the negotiations it was at times a battle of attrition. This was not it must be said, because of the EC’s Development Directorate, but principally because of the hard line taken by certain EU member states. Having no historic relationship with the ACP they were not convinced that there should be special or even transitional measures for nations that were, in their view, not prepared to change.
Thus these negotiations were trade driven and largely about mechanisms aimed at equalising the ACP’s relationship with that of other nations.
No one should be under any illusion about the implications of this. The new agreement with Europe will impact not only on economic relations and aid, which under the new treaty will be largely designed to enable this transitional process. It will, for the Caribbean, also change the nature of the political relationship with Europe, most especially the United Kingdom, as well as with the US and much of the Americas. Trade is perhaps the most significant element of the cement that determines national interrelationships when strategic, humanitarian, religious or political matters are not at issue between nations. The new arrangement will result in the restructuring of trade and production and its is probable that government to government relationships previously taken for granted will also change unless renewed or modernised in the light of changed trade and aid flows.
By agreeing to alter the nature of the trade relationship with Europe the region has accepted that within a relatively short period it has to be economically independent. It has also accepted implicitly that in a WTO-led world it will have to survive on the basis of real integration and a much broader relationship with Europe, the Americas and other powerful nations and blocs.
This is not to suggest that traditional friends will abandon the region but to note that the post Lomé arrangement changes the nature of the relationship and the ways in which the region as a whole will have to relate to Europe after 2008.
Writing just as the negotiations have concluded it is difficult to signal the significance of what has been agreed. The hundreds of pages of dry and technical texts do not convey easily the importance of what has happened. Nor do they suggest the dramatic impact of other events, such as the collapse of the millennium trade round in Seattle or other seemingly unconnected developments had on the negotiating process.
In 1998 the EU published a green paper that sought to specify the future post Lomé relationship between the ACP and the EU. The ACP though divided over solutions, agreed an alternative approach, which required flexibility on the part of Europe, and a non-prescriptive solution. Over the subsequent two years ACP solidarity held, just, and a flexible arrangement was reached on February 3rd, which provides hope for the Caribbean. The challenge now will be for governments and the regional private sector to use wisely the mechanisms agreed.