Economy & Trade, Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean, North America

CARIBBEAN: Bush, Haiti Could Upstage Economic Talks

Peter Richards

PORT OF SPAIN, Nov 7 2004 (IPS) - Recent events have caught up to the agenda for Monday’s meeting of leaders to discuss the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), the region’s response to a changing global environment characterised by mega trading blocs.

While the recent decision of the European Union (EU) to reduce the price it pays for Caribbean sugar has underscored the need for the leaders to get moving on the CSME – slated to start in 2005 – the damage caused by recent hurricanes, the situation in Haiti and the re-election of U.S. President George W Bush are bound to get attention at the Nov. 8-9 summit in Trinidad.

In September, a two-day stakeholders meeting to discuss Europe’s sugar proposal ended with delegates rejecting the plan, while "agreeing on an action plan to tackle the region’s opposition to the imminent EU sugar regime" according to a statement issued after the talks in Guyana.

Trinidad and Tobago Trade and Industry Minister Ken Valley regards the CSME as a "a definitive response to the implications of the globalisation process."

Speaking in the Dominican Republic last week he said it would also "serve to deepen the scope of the regional integration process."

The CSME, with its emphasis on free movement of skills, labour, goods and services across the region, is due to be implemented by December 2005, although Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados and Jamaica have indicated they are willing to proceed possibly by the start of 2005.

Barbados Prime Minister Owen Arthur, who has lead responsibility for the plan, said in July that 72 million U.S. dollars is needed over 10 years to put the CSME in place region-wide; this week’s summit will provide another opportunity to discuss possible sources of those funds.

But the leaders are now likely to beef up the agenda. The devastation of several states – most notably Grenada and the Bahamas – by hurricanes in September, and the economic impact on the region; the ongoing political crisis in Haiti and the outcome of the U.S. elections are now likely to find a place in the talks.

Caribbean leaders met in a special summit in September to discuss the impact of the storms, and will no doubt receive updates here on the progress of rehabilitation efforts in the affected countries.

Haiti had emerged as a key agenda item during the leaders’ annual four-day summit in July, with the politicians divided on whether to recognise the U.S.-backed interim administration of Gerard Latortue in Port-au-Prince.

That division remains, even after the leaders sent a ministerial delegation to Haiti for a first-hand view of the situation. In October, CARICOM foreign ministers met in Barbados to discuss Haiti’s political situation, now compounded by fresh acts of violence and tropical storm destruction that has left thousands dead.

Antigua’s Foreign Minister Harold Lovell said CARICOM was still open to helping the former French colony hold "free and fair elections in a very short period of time."

"CARICOM remains ready and willing to assist in this endeavour to ensure that elections are held sooner rather than later," he added.

The victory of incumbent George Bush is also likely to pose more problems for the leaders, even though current CARICOM Chairman, Keith Mitchell of Grenada, said in his congratulatory message to Bush the re-election would "encourage the wider world to face, bravely, the global threats to democracy and economic prosperity."

Noted political scientist Professor Neville Duncan said it is vital the region seek an early meeting with Bush so as to reconfigure U.S.-Caribbean relations. Duncan, who said the region would have fared better with Democrat John Kerry in the White House, told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) that during his first term in office, Bush "significantly cut" aid to the region.

He said talks with the new Bush administration should address that issue and also focus on Washington’s contribution "to significantly shutting down the flow of small arms, which is significantly fuelling the rise of crime in the region aligned with illegal drug trafficking."

Taking a different tack, lecturer in international relations at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Vaughan Lewis, said the Caribbean needs to develop closer relations with countries like Brazil and should seek membership in forums "in which other ‘heavier’ Latin American countries are involved, and through that channel get closer to having influence over the United States."

"I think we need to take a fresh look at how we can seek to exert influence in respect of the positions that we want the United States to consider, and whether our diplomacy is not inclusive in taking into account other positions into the hemisphere," he told IPS.

"I think CARICOM itself has to square its own positions, positions on Haiti for example. We are still not taking very cohesive positions in relation to the whole question of security, the movement of narcotics and so on," added Lewis.

But newspaper columnist Dennis Morrison said the Caribbean should not expect anything more than passing mention in Washington.

"Gone are the days when in return for attaching ourselves to the U.S. side of the ideological battle, we were able to extract political rent in the order of 200 million dollars worth of assistance each year. We have no such leverage in these times and must stand on our own feet in respect of the economic and social transformation of our country," he wrote in the ‘Jamaica Observer’ newspaper Thursday.

Veteran Caribbean journalist Rickey Singh said the election of a new secretary general for the Organisation of American States (OAS) to replace Costa Rica’s ex-President Miguel Angel Rodriguez (who resigned over corruption charges in his homeland) could also test the region’s relationship with Washington.

"While it would not be among the more pressing foreign policy issues for the George Bush administration à who occupies the post of secretary general of the OAS is, of course, of much importance to the USA," he wrote in his newspaper column Thursday.

Singh says the OAS remains a key forum for achieving U.S. foreign policy objectives in the western hemisphere. "The USA is quite aware of the significant emergence of what is perceived as the ‘Caribbean bloc’ in the hemispheric body, with CARICOM rarely having a problem in starting out with a minimum of 14 of the 34 available votes, plus a potential four or five," he added.

Lewis said the region should pay particular attention to the bilateral trade agreement that Washington signed with Central America and the Dominican Republic, a deal that will soon go through the U.S. Congress.

He believes the pact "breaks the framework of the Caribbean Basin Initiative," the mechanism that provided the region with an opportunity of selling a limited range of products duty-free in the United States.

"I believe that CARICOM needs to be paying some attention to it and paying attention to where we have to position ourselves in hemispheric relations, what relationships we have with other countries that can allow or induce the United States to see some of our positions more clearly than at present," Lewis said.