France has agreed to play a key role in lobbying World Trade Organisation member countries to support the waiver application now before that body with respect to the WTO compatibility of the recently concluded successor agreement to the Lome IV Convention between the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group and the European Union (EU). France takes over the chairmanship of the EU as of July 1 this year.
Reporting on the outcome of a Summit meeting between French President Jacques Chirac and leaders of the CARIFORUM group of the ACP in Pointe-a-Pitre, Guadeloupe at the weekend, Jamaica’s Prime Minister and CARIFORUM Chairman, P.J. Patterson made it clear that much was expected of France’s role in helping to ensure that tangible benefits are reaped from the recent agreement which is expected to be signed in Suva, Fiji at the end of May this year.
He said failure on the part of the WTO to grant the waiver, which among other things, will ensure the roll-over of several commodity protocols including bananas, sugar and rum would have a catastrophic effect on the Caribbean and other ACP countries. Mr. Patterson, who was speaking on Friday March 10, at a press conference at the end of the one-day summit, which he co-chaired with the French President added that, “it would be a fundamentally retrograde step moving away from the positive collaboration which should be taking place between 85 countries of the north and south who now constitute the ACP/EU arrangement.”
The WTO waiver application, which requires a three quarters majority approval among WTO member countries was also high on the agenda of a meeting of the CARICOM Prime Ministerial Sub-Committee on External Negotiations which Mr. Patterson chaired in Basseterre, St. Kitts and Nevis on Sunday March 12.
Mr. Patterson also lauded on behalf of the CARIFORUM group, the support that France has given in the European Union to the application by Cuba to become a signatory to the post Lome Convention at the time that it comes to be signed later this year. Cuba has been participating as an Observer in the ACP, CARIFORUM and the negotiations for the post Lome Accord. He described the French position on Cuba’s membership as an “enlightened” approach.
Mr. Patterson said the CARIFORUM leaders regarded the Summit with the French leader as a purposeful meeting and a clear indication that France was not abdicating its responsibility to the Caribbean and intended to make a meaningful and constructive contribution to the development of the region and to the integration process involving the French, Spanish and English speaking Caribbean nations. “It is a clear sign that France is not surrendering its interests in the Caribbean on the grounds that because of our location, the region can be abandoned to shortsighted concepts that despite their sovereign presence in the Caribbean it is now outside of their sphere of influence,” Prime Minister Patterson said.
He noted that France had a peculiar and special understanding of the concerns of the Caribbean through its own trade and development relationship with the French Overseas Departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique.
Instead of issuing any pious declaration at the end of the Summit, Mr. Patterson said, it was decided that emphasis would be placed on systematic and institutionalised follow-up to the France/CARIFORUM Summit through respective capitals, the United Nations, the WTO and the ACP/EU machinery in Brussels. He said both sides had agreed to and were serious about building on the understanding they have reached.
Other issues discussed by the French and CARIFORUM leaders included debt relief and in particular, the decision taken by the G7 Group of industrialised nations with regard to the most heavily indebted poor countries as well as proposals from the French President to advance those initiatives.
On the agenda too was the issue of the opposition of the Caribbean states to the efforts by industrialised states to restrict the development of financial and offshore banking services in the developing world citing harmful tax competition. “As we seek to diversify our productive base and move away from one that is exclusively commodity driven, we must enter a field where services offer a significant opportunity,” the CARIFORUM Chairman explained.
Greater cooperation in aviation and maritime matters, cultural exchanges, languages training and research and technological development especially in agronomy are matters which were discussed and are to be the subject of further discussions and action at various levels.
Office of the Prime Minister
Jamaica
12 March 2000
