ACP prepares for legal fight over EU sugar regime
By Gitanjali Singh
Stabroek News
February 11, 2003
The African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group of countries is preparing legal briefs given that Brazil and Australia are almost certain to take their challenge to the European Union sugar regime to a World Trade Organisation dispute settlement panel.
Brazil signalled its intention to take the challenge to the panel on the eve of an ACP mission arriving in Brasilia last week to try and lobby them against the move. Minister of Foreign Trade and International Co-operation Clement Rohee said yesterday at a press conference that Brazil's timing was, "a little insensitive" but felt that "all is not lost".
Rohee was part of the Enlarged Bureau of the ACP ministerial delegation headed by Mauritius Agriculture Minister Pravind Jugnauth, and which included representatives from Swaziland and Fiji. The delegation met with the acting ministers of agriculture and trade and commerce, and the minister of foreign affairs with responsibility for external trade.
Notwithstanding Brazil's intention to move to a dispute panel, Rohee said the Brazilian government had indicated its willingness to find a resolution to the problem, outside of the WTO, to benefit all parties.
He said the ACP mission had put some proposals to the Brazilian government but was unwilling to reveal what these might be. These proposals were put forward not only by the ACP group but were done in partnership with the EU, said Rohee.
In relation to Australia, he said that Jamaica's Prime Minister, PJ Patterson had written his counterpart on the issue at the level of the Commonwealth. Fiji has also been in discussions with Australia but he feels that Australia was looking to see what Brazil was doing.
Brazil and Australia have repeatedly assured the ACP that they intend no harm to the ACP preferential arrangements for sugar, but the ACP countries would like those assurances translated into a concrete position so that preferences are maintained.
The main features of the Brazil/Australia challenge to the WTO are the targeting of EU export subsidies to sugar and the payment of a subsidy in the form of the intervention price for refined EC sugar which is not available to sugar imported from non-preferential sources.
The ACP lobby mission feels that the challenge of the EU sugar regime, which provides a preferential market to ACP producers under the Sugar Protocol and the Special Preferential Sugar (SPS) Arrangement, has the indirect effect of posing a very severe threat.
The Sugar Protocol is a preferential agreement under which CARICOM and other ACP countries export sugar to the EU at guaranteed prices. The SPS introduced by the EU in 2001 allows additional imports of sugar at a price below the sugar protocol price but well above the world market price.
The price that ACP countries are paid for sugar exports to the EU is dependent on the European domestic price paid to beet farmers who are given subsidies now under question. Any change in the sugar regime such as a reduction in EU domestic prices or a questioning of the EU right to re-export the ACP supply of $1.6M tonnes would result in both lower prices and a possible reduction in EU imports. (Miranda La Rose)
