When sugar is not sweet
By Rickey Singh
Guyana Chronicle
July 24, 2004
HAUNTED by the social and economic consequences to the banana economies of the Caribbean when the European Union changed its banana purchasing regime, this region's sugar producing countries are now gearing for a tough battle to prevent massive reductions from next year in the price paid for our sugar on the European market.
Within the Caribbean Community the country that stands to be most affected by what the region's governments have collectively deemed a potential "catastrophe", is Guyana.
As a major source of employment and foreign exchange, sugar is as important to Guyana as tourism would be for a number of CARICOM economies, including Barbados and Jamaica.
If the proposals of the European Commission are implemented, Caribbean producers stand to lose some US$90 million annually over a three-year period. Guyana, Jamaica, Belize and Barbados will be affected. But the biggest damage will be to Guyana's economy.
As its Minister of Foreign Trade and International Cooperation, Clement Rohee, has told the Guyana Parliament, the country would suffer a loss of approximately US$37 million annually. In terms of social costs, it will adversely affect the livelihoods of some 20,000 sugar industry workers, 5,000 private cane farmers and indirectly an estimated 100,000 workers in the country's commercial sector.
CARICOM is aware that even in moving together the region's sugar producers remain too weak to influence any significant changes in the proposed overhaul by the European Commission (EC) of Europe's sugar industry and purchasing policy on sugar imports. Consequently, it is doing what's best -- working in tandem with its allies in the African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) bloc of countries.
At the ACP Summit in Maputo, Mozambique in May, at which CARICOM was represented by (Barbados) Prime Minister Owen Arthur, a consultative group was identified to deal specifically with the European Commission's plan to radically change its sugar regime over a four-year period starting in 2005.
According to the EU's Agriculture Commissioner, Franz Fischler, the proposed reform of Europe's sugar industry will give both the EU and sugar-producing developing countries "a realistic perspective". Europe's consumers, he said, "will see much more market orientation, developing countries much less trade distortions...and all parties will have time to adjust".
The Caribbean (and its African and Pacific partners) have vowed to mobilise forces -- technical, diplomatic and ministerial l-- to engage European Delegations in their respective jurisdictions and enter into wider and more top-level negotiations in Brussels and elsewhere to prevent an envisaged 37 per cent reduction in the guaranteed price for sugar sold to Europe under the ACP-EU Sugar Protocol.
At their recent 25th Summit in Grenada, CARICOM leaders in rejecting the EC's planned overhaul of the EU's sugar regime, noted that the projected overall loss to the sugar-supplying countries outstrips by more than 150 per cent the total aid the EU has committed to regional programmes for the current five-year cycle under the ACP-EU agreement.
In Guyana, the offensive against the proposed price reductions has had some dramatic manifestations, with top bosses of the state-owned Guyana Sugar Corporation, officials of the unions and Minister Rohee joining forces to demonstrate outside the European Delegation office in Georgetown.
Such tactics are, of course, symbolic.
The really tough battle is yet to come.
(Courtesy yesterday's `Weekend Nation’ of Barbados)