For much of the last week I have been speaking to smaller Caribbean companies about the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Europe. What they told me was far removed from the often personal and acrimonious public debate that is taking place between those who informed or approved the strategic direction of the negotiating process.
Those that I met were not the companies that are invested inter-regionally or overseas. Rather they were the businessmen and women who run the enterprises that are the life-blood of most Caribbean economies: the manufacturers, the small hotel owners and the producers of fruit and vegetables for the export market.
To a man and woman they were perplexed and unsure what the EPA might mean for their businesses. In some cases they had attended the stakeholders meetings that had been organised across the region during the negotiations. Others had been present at the few government-led meetings that had been held in the Caribbean since the text was initialled last December.
Since then, the public debate had begun to alarm them because they were unable to check the final document and its schedules to ascertain what the EPA meant for them.
In these conversations a number of issues emerged that point less to fundamental opposition and more the absence of user friendly information so that they could relate what had been negotiated to their bottom line.
In essence their concerns fell into four areas.
The first was the absence of the final text. In every single conversation what was clear was that none of my interlocutors had seen or read the all important tariff reduction schedules that instantly make clear whether a European product is excluded, subject to gradually reducing tariffs and over what period this will happen.
In the case of services what emerged was that the few who had seen the schedules found them utterly incomprehensible as they are written in the language of trade and the WTO’s four modes of services activity. For this reason there was an almost universal lack of awareness that most Caribbean governments had entered many protective caveats or restrictions ranging from the continuing requirement for work permits and licensing to more general restrictions on EU companies being given the same treatment as indigenous companies.
Secondly there was a sense that some governments and public sector entities were reluctant to share the information that they had. This was a part of a much broader concern about the ethos of the Caribbean public sector and a belief in the civil service, it was suggested, that restricting information equated to power. This was coupled with the more specific view that because the public sector did not understand the ways in which business operated and how profit was intimately linked to funding the national economy and to social objectives, many in the public sector had not yet grasped what they must do with respect to the EPA.
That is to say that much of the public sector had not comprehended that the EPA would require them to become enablers if business was to flourish, and that they would have less of a commanding role in the direction of the economy. As such this would place a heavy burden on them to provide information and make transparent and timely decisions.
Thirdly there was a deep concern, verging on anger, about the ability of the European Commission and its representatives to deliver development assistance to the private sector. Thus there was deep concern as to whether business could develop the standards, inter-connectivity or the many other areas of support promised in the text of the EPA to achieve international competitiveness.
In this context nothing had angered the private sector associations and individual companies more than the boasts made in 2007 by the EC’s Development Commissioner Louis Michel, that there would be
