Trade Ambassador comments on WTO conference
Much of the media attention during the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle, Washington last week was focused on the protests in the streets. But inside the conference rooms tensions were also building. Talks collapsed after the developing nations made it clear they were not willing to move on to new issues and agreements being proposed by the larger stations until existing agreements, and disagreements, had been reviewed. These including an area of concern for many Caribbean states, including Belize, that of banana exports to the European Union. The WTO’s ruling that such preferential trade was incompatible with WTO regulations, could have serious consequences for small states. Although the talks in Seattle broke down, Eamon Courtenay, Ambassador of Trade and Investment says the small states were effective in preventing the large ones from imposing new labor and environmental regulations and speeding up the implementation of other agreements. Courtenay says the small states will now take advantage of the absence of instructions for WTO negotiators. They will go back to Geneva to insist that certain agreements need to be reviewed and reformed.
Eamon Courtenay, Ambassador of Trade and Investment
“To cite a very pertinent example, the experience of Belize, the Caribbean, ACP with the WTO is the banana issue. If we knew in 1994 when we had the WTO agreement that the effect of implementing some of the measures with WTO was in effect to revoke existing agreements under Lome then we would never have agreed. And so we have been trying to say that we need to review this type of effect on WTO to existing agreements and that’s what we will be working on over the next year or two.”
Courtenay says other small states are also coming to accept a concept that Belize has promoted for some time: gradualism. He says despite pressures from more developed nations, small states cannot liberalize trade barriers instantaneously, but must allow time for their economies to develop and adjust.
Eamon Courtenay
“We have called it the principle of gradualism. It is gaining currency in the developing world; quite a few of the countries are grabbing on to it. Minister Fonseca has come up with another definition of this, what we call the gradualism coefficient. In other words, that we have to arrive at a formula that is going to be of general application. That once a country reaches a certain level of development, then it can implement another level, give further liberalization. And as it develops further we continue to open our markets. But it can’t be that at the very beginning, we just open our market, for example to Mexico or Guatemala. Belize would not want to open its market without any curtailment at all to these neighboring countries, without saying let’s do it slowly, over a period of time.”
Minister of Economic Development Ralph Fonseca, who headed the delegation to Seattle has flown to Brussels for the Asian, Caribbean and Pacific ministerial meeting over the next two days. Delegates will continue their efforts to promote banana exports and design a system which is WTO compatible but which can accommodate special trading agreements with the European Union.
