This Week in Europe, 27 October 2000
Executive Director of the Caribbean Council for Europe
When the history of the Caribbean’s last decade comes to be written, it will tell a story of constant external attack by Europe and the US on first one and then another of the industries that are central to the region’s economic stability. It may also tell the story of the rise of organised crime.
As is well known, the first Caribbean industry to be challenged was bananas. Although few now remember, it was as long ago as 1994 when the US first decided to raise questions about the discriminatory nature of the European Union’s (EU) banana regime. Then in 1996 and 1997 the rum industry came close to destruction. At that time the EU and US decided bilaterally to liberalise immediately the markets for white spirits, initially without taking account of the EU’s special arrangements for rum from the ACP Caribbean or the rums of Martinique or Guadeloupe.
More recently in 1999, the OECD launched their ‘harmful tax initiative’ to try to regulate or close some of the world’s offshore financial regimes. This had the effect of threatening the future of the region’s fast growing offshore financial services sector. Then, earlier this year, the World Bank proposed criteria for a unique environmental tax on the Caribbean tourist industry in such a way as to lessen its global competitiveness. And finally in the last few weeks, the European Commission (EC) has put forward laudable proposals that will benefit the worlds poorest in the Least and Less Developed Countries but will damage more developed ACP commodity producers. These have the effect if implemented in their present form of harming perhaps terminally much of the sugar and rice industries as well as causing new problems for the banana and rum industries.
Despite the seriousness of such issues for the Caribbean, history probably will show that every one of these external initiatives had in their origin little or nothing to do with Europe or the US’s concerns about the industries in the region. Rather the Caribbean will be seen to have had the misfortune of being caught in early transatlantic battles on matters of principle relating to the role the US and EU believe they should play in trade liberalisation and the process of globalisation.
But what might history say about the consequences of such threats?
Undoubtedly it will report on the creative and effective strategies the region took towards trying to find practical ways to resolve and ameliorate the economic impact. But it will almost certainly also observe that, at best, the most that could be achieved were reasonable transition period in which most, but not all, Caribbean economies began to adjust to the new economy of services. But history may also observe an unwanted by-product of the rapid erosion of preference in those nations that were unable or unwilling to take the steps necessary to prepare their economies for rapid externally led change. That is to say the growth of criminality.
It is common to argue that the rapid decline in decline in the production of cash crops such as bananas leads to the growth of new crops such as ganja. Indeed there is already enough visible evidence in certain islands in the Eastern Caribbean that this is the case. But a recent working paper by the Trinidadian Professor, Anthony Bryan, entitled Transnational Organised Crime: the Caribbean Context* suggests an alarmingly wider range of illegal activity now developing in the Caribbean which by inference, may be stimulated by economic instability.
Professor Bryan’s paper suggests that narcotics production and trafficking is the obvious tip of a much larger and growing criminal threat. He details in his paper a wide and expanding range of other criminal activities in the region. These include money laundering, computer crimes such as internet fraud, the trade in light weapons to support domestic criminal activity, the smuggling of people, largely to gain access to the United States, the sale of citizenship by corrupt officials, and the theft of intellectual property.
Professor Bryan’s paper argues that increasingly the structure of those crime syndicates seeking to make use of the Caribbean is very similar to that of multinational companies. He suggests that they are outstanding examples of ‘companies’ that have made use of globalisation and now follow the same organisational disciplines as legitimate multinational corporations. He also points to the ways in which such organisations operating in one Caribbean environment can create problems in another because of their capacity to move sums of money sometimes greater than the economies of one or more regional nation.
While his paper attributes much of such activity to transnational crime syndicates, it provides detailed evidence of the threat awaiting those Caribbean nations unable to respond to the economic crises forced upon them by nations outside of the region. Yet despite the emerging evidence from his and other studies about rising criminality, the consequences of rapid trade liberalisation on criminal activity seems still to be underplayed.
There appear to be a number of reasons for this. Firstly there seems to be little in the way of empirical evidence linking negative trade policy decisions to the growth of domestic and transnational crime. While the various security agencies in and beyond the region monitor narcotics flows and production, they are not paid to look at the cause. Rather their interest and the vast and growing business that now surrounds the drugs interdiction and eradication industry, concentrates on halting the effect. Secondly and for obvious reasons, it is not a subject that is easy to study. Academics who might normally consider both cause and effect and forecast the economic implications can only guess at the statistical linkages between trade policy, economic instability and crime. And then it is dangerous. As some academics have found, like investigative journalists before them, those involved in the range of criminal activity listed by Professor Bryan are individuals of substance with reach in the region and beyond.
Small Caribbean states are peculiarly vulnerable to international crime. Trade liberalisation threatens in the short term to weaken all but the strongest nations in the region. Despite this, any change in trade policy and its relationship to criminality is not seen in any holistic way. As a result decisions are taken and others are left to deal with the consequences.
Organisations such as the WTO and the US and EU must cease to be blind to the linkages.
*Professor Tony Bryan’s working paper Transnational Organised Crime: The Caribbean Context is available from the North-South Centre at the University of Miami, where he is the Director of the Caribbean Studies Programme abryn@miami.edu