Caribbean Community (Caricom) trade ministers have expressed their dismay at the latest set of proposals from the European Union for new banana-import tariff measures.
The ministers issued a joint statement at the 27th Meeting of the Council for Trade and Economic Development earlier this month when they urged the EU to act in accordance with its commitments under successive partnership agreements with the ACP and the CARIFORUM/EC Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), which require the EU to avoid swingeing cuts in favour of most-favoured-nation producers from Latin America. The ministers emphasised that the European Commission proposal to reduce the already lowered MFN tariff of €176 (£155) to €136 a tonne by 2011, falling to €114 a tonne by 2016, would seriously damage regional production and exports to the EU market. They also highlighted the difficult and long-lasting damaging effects it would have on economic and social conditions in the Caribbean.
Ministers underlined that the prospect of even further tariff reductions in the context of the EU negotiations with the Central American countries is causing great alarm in the region.
In their joint statement they said: “CARIFORUM producers are committed to modernizing the sector and to improving their economies in partnership with the EU. Ministers remind the EU of the provisions of Article 42 of the EPA, which commits the EU to maintain for as long as is feasible, significant preferential access for traditional agricultural exports from the CARIFORUM countries.”
The trade ministers from the 15 member states in Caricom also expressed dissatisfaction with the €110 million financial package proposed by the European Commission, which falls short of ACP estimates of the losses to be incurred. “Furthermore, the EC offer does not take into account the resources needed to support improving cost efficiencies, sector diversification as well as the support to redeployment to alternative non-banana activities,” the ministers said in their statement. They urged the EU to take the full scope of their ACP partners’ needs into account in the financial package, which, they said, should be additional to already programmed EDF resources and should contain discrete allocations for the Caribbean.
They said they are calling on the EU to “revisit the pace and depth of the proposed reductions in the MFN tariff rates and to reconsider the package of support for adjustment in the ACP banana producing states thereby reinforcing the principles of partnership established in the CARIFORUM-EC EPA and the Cotonou Agreement of 2000.”
