Glenys Kinnock, Contributor
AS A veteran of Seattle, Doha and Cancun, and as I prepare for the WTO Ministerial in Hong Kong, I have a sense of déjà vu. Tensions are beginning to grow, just as levels of ambition are lowered, the situation is clearly grim. How now can we avoid the kind of spectacular and shambolic collapse we have already seen twice before? If there is no progress, despair and hopelessness will set in, and people across the world will know how serious we are about making poverty history.
In Hong Kong, I will as usual, spend a great deal of time running between my African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) contacts and European negotiators. This means keeping up with the positions pursued by the ACP Ministers and keeping in touch with Parliamentarians who attend our ACP EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly. The Group of 78 African, Caribbean and Pacific countries now has an unprecedented international identity, thanks to their prominent role at the WTO and in the Group of 90 (G90). They are well aware that the multilateral trading system is failing to make the essential contribution to their efforts to eradicate poverty in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as in the other marginalised countries in the Caribbean and the Pacific. The ACP share a crucial and common concern, which stems from their heavy dependence on European markets for the export of their agricultural commodities. They are suffering from the effects of falling prices, from their specialisation in exports of low value, and most of all, from the erosion of their preferential market access to Europe. They have historic connections with Europe and argue that at this time there should be specific and concrete solutions to the problems the loss of preferences is causing them.
They would have wished that preferences could have been maintained until all domestic and export subsidies that so seriously affect their commodities were removed. In the negotiations including among the emerging economies, such as Brazil and Ecuador, there are those that argue that Europe's trading arrangements with the ACP are now nothing more than ideological baggage that ought to be disposed of as soon as possible.
Recent WTO adjudications on ACP sugar and bananas provide evidence of this. In 2004, a complaint was lodged by Australia, Brazil and Thailand and the outcome was that the EU was obliged to reform its sugar policy or risk trade sanctions.
No one would argue against the need to end the dumping of surplus sugar on the world market, but the ACP are deeply resentful that they have ended up being the collateral damage.
This month, Agriculture Ministers agreed a package of measures on sugar including a 36 per cent price cut over a four year period. For Caribbean producers, in particular, this draconian arrangement will threaten hundreds of thousands of livelihoods. As I learnt in Guyana a few weeks ago, sugar accounts for 20 per cent of their GDP and over 50 per cent of their agricultural output. The Guyanese President, Bharrat Jagdeo, has said at the Commonwealth meeting two weeks ago in Malta, "the agreement amounts to a betrayal which proves that the EU cannot be trusted". The adjustment is simply impossible for them, although they are making efforts to modernise, restructure and diversify. In the Caribbean alone, the losses are expected to be more than £130 million.
Glenys Kinnock is a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) most interested in Caribbean development issues and co-chair of the ACP-EU Joint Parliamentary Assembly, a member of the European Parliament's Development Committee and the Parliament's rapporteur on sugar reform.
