CARICOM and the Current Challenges of Multilateral Trade Negotiations

• Author: Jessica Byron, UWI, Jamaica
• Pages: 65-87

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Caricom and the Current Challenges of Multilateral Trade Negotiations

This article was originally prepared for the special Tenth Anniversary

issue of the Revista Venezolana de Ciencias Sociales which features

the Caribbean Basin, and is published in that September 2004 issue

as “La Comunidad del Caribe Frente a los Procesos del ALCA y de

la UE.” I am grateful to the editors of the Revista who have allowed

me to publish it here in English.

Introduction

“Trade agreements are a prism through which to view the problems

that have engaged us for so many decades...” (M. Bray, Latin

American Perspectives, 31, 1, 2004, p. 28).

In Caribbean debates on the nature of globalization, some voices have

argued that the region is no stranger to this process, since Caribbean societies

are themselves the products of an early form of globalized movement of

goods and peoples that began in the 1500s (Klak, 1998, 6; Thomas in Benn

and Hall, 2000a, 8). However, analysts have also pointed out that the

globalization of the 1980s and beyond is an unprecedented process which is

reconfiguring the organization of our societies and the ways in which we are

linked to the rest of the world economy (Thomas in Benn and Hall, 2000a, 9;

Bernal in Benn and Hall, 2000b, 295). The present article reflects that second

point of view. It examines the major changes that have been underway since

the early 1990s in the political and economic relations between the CARICOM

countries and Europe, and CARICOM and the rest of the Western Hemisphere.

CARICOM AND THE CURRENT

CHALLENGES OF MULTILATERAL

TRADE NEGOTIATIONS

Jessica Byron

University of the West Indies, Mona, Jamaica

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66 CARICOM: Appropriate Adaptation to a Changing Global Environment

It identifies the advent of a toughened world trade regime under the auspices

of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the reshaping of the political

architecture in Europe and the Americas as the two critical factors driving

this process of change.

During the early 1990s, CARICOM began a major restructuring, designed

to establish a single market and economy (CSME) among its member states.

It was felt that this was one way of counteracting the economic and political

marginalization that the small countries feared in the onslaught of

globalization and the aftermath of Cold War politics. Some countries, notably

Trinidad & Tobago and Barbados, also embarked on domestic structural

adjustment processes in a bid to increase the competitiveness of their

economies. In general, CARICOM countries adopted a defensive posture

towards the rapidly changing global political economy, viewing it with

apprehension, feeling that their options vis-à-vis a harsh external environment

were dwindling. They were particularly concerned by the steady phasing out

of developmentalist principles fought for during the North-South economic

negotiations of the 1960s and 1970s, such as non-reciprocal preferential

market access and concessionary capital flows for developing countries. In

this new era, developing countries were re-categorized as Least Developed

Countries (LLDCs) which would still have access to such facilities, and Middle

Income Developing Countries, like most CARICOM states, which would be

gradually subjected to the rules of a liberalized global economy. Part of their

restructuring exercise involved establishing new mechanisms for diplomatic

coordination to manage the plethora of trade negotiations that were looming

in the GATT/WTO, with the European Union in the context of EU-ACP

relations and within the Western Hemisphere. The new multilateralism of

the 1990s placed a heavy burden of representation and participation on small,

developing countries and closer regional cooperation was the main way they

envisaged they could meet this challenge.

It is evident, therefore, that globalization has been a powerful catalyst

for domestic and regional restructuring, for the participation of non-state

actors in the trade policy process, and for the re-designing of the regimes that

govern the trade relations among CARICOM countries themselves and

between themselves and other actors. This article first examines the negotiating

and trade environment for the CARICOM countries since 1994 and their

institutional responses to the challenges. We then discuss the changing

kaleidoscope of relations between the European Union (EU) and the African-

Caribbean-Pacific (ACP) group of countries which has engendered the Cotonou

Treaty, signed in Benin in June 2000. Finally, we analyze the Caribbean role