Dear Editor,
The recent criticism, at the end of a four year process, of the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM), that it had failed to consult on the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), is a little precious. As one of the relatively few Caribbean citizens who have had the good fortune of attending international meetings/summits and conferences for more than a decade – sponsored mostly as I was from outside of the region – I have come to accept that there is really little interest from our governments in the “meaningful and effective participation” of persons from civil society. Equally, many in civil society are themselves less than energetic in negotiating and or demanding their right to participate. This could not be truer than in the economic sphere and especially the trade arena which has become (perhaps it always was) a zone of forbidding jargon and technical terms.
When the first issues around bananas arose in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) many colleagues at WTO meetings (from Euro-pean and other civil society groupings) wondered at the absence of Caribbean representatives, especially from the farmers and women groups-those thought to be the most affected by any new rules.
We are always thin on the ground at the official and unofficial level; it is costly to go to these meetings and negotiations can last for many days and weeks if we count up all the spaces and places you should occupy to be there to challenge the developed so called “partners”. Our governments find it difficult to attend all these meetings: there are many meetings on every aspect of our lives and we simply do not have the personnel (how could we, with our micro economies?) sufficient to match the United States and Europe, to name only two of the big players. At some meetings the United States or Europe may have over a hundred or more representatives in their delegation; all their experts from different departments in place at the meetings to do the back up work. It is mainly out of this reality that Caricom and the CRNM were given their mandate to negotiate for the region since they would have the institutional memory badly needed at these fate deciding encounters.
But it was assumed, understood and promised that they would not only refer back to governments but that the governments themselves would assist in establishing broader based stakeholder meetings to inform themselves of other realities and perspectives. One such was the National Advisory Committees which were established to bring together stakeholders and, in turn, to give feedback to our negotiators on the issues. Our wider group of experts would be back home, as they say, “in capital” to ensure that there would be the “meaningful and effective” participation of the Caribbean people (the stated beneficiaries) of these programmes, platforms and outcomes. This consultative loop was how our region would ensure that the ‘”non state actors” would be heard and their opinions would be taken into account in the process as relevant. So that when the ink was dry, we Caribbean people, the objects and subjects of these myriad processes, would not be caught unaware. And, after all, use of the world-wide web would make all this as easy as kissing hands; real time information from all concerned parties – chat rooms, web postings, briefing papers and the endless possibilities of googling the discourse from the donors and other groupings of countries. And, where access to Information Technology re-mained limited in the deep rural or underserved peri-urban communities, then local and other representatives of women, farmers, political organisations, indi-genous people, academia , religious organizations and other “major groups” with access to IT, would be the national links to inform and engage those citizens with limited access to have their views taken on board as well . This participatory model was meant to ensure that members of these organizations and or ordinary citizens would or could be aware of and participate in decisions that would affect their lives – all this in a timely manner for negotiators and other decision makers.
But, as we can see from the current criticisms these stakeholder committees, the virtual chat rooms and other IT operations, the consultative loops either do not exist or function poorly. Whose fault is this? How do we ensure timely and accessible information to all or indeed any stakeholders if we do not institutionalize these encounters? Contrast our experience with that of Africa and the role that Third World Network and other networks played:
“The Stop EPAs campaign was launched at Lusaka today with a ringing and militant call on African people to mobilise themselves to provide their governments with the moral authority to reject the Economic Partnership Agreements being negotiated between the ACP countries and the European Union. (December 14th 2004)”
In my experience the attempts to build stakeholder groups such as the Caribbean Policy Development Centre (CPDC) or the Caribbean Gender and Trade Network have been less than successful. Why? It is difficult for these regional civil society groupings to function without adequate resources. Surely it is not good enough for us to rely on external NGO funding from organisations such as OXFAM while our Region’s governments and some of the well resourced non-state actors do not find it fit to enable and support these essential nodes of opinion. Perhaps this is why many of these stakeholder hubs are criticized as being more donor oriented than constituency regarding. Why has the region not realised that in order to build a real “body of opinion” they need to financially enable and otherwise support these key stakeholder groups? Why are there no adequate subventions to permit national and regional consultations? And why do we accept this?
It is only after this lack of commitment to the process of participation is addressed that we can really speak to the limited access and knowledge of the trade negotiations or any negotiations for that matter. And it is only when civil society – in its diverse forms – develops a strong demand-driven agenda, in a timely manner, that we can guarantee an end to our real and perceived exclusion from these critical discussions and those decisions that affect the people of the Caribbean so profoundly.
Yours faithfully,
Jocelyn Dow
