ISDS Case Map
EPAs
Economic Partnership Agreements between the EU and ACP countries (under the Cotonou Agreement)
The Caribbean could suffer economically if a proposed free trade agreement between several regional countries and the European Union is signed because of damaging flaws in the deal, according to Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyana's president. “Europe negotiated in bad faith. We were bullied into this.”
In the light of the ongoing debate on the economic partnership agreement (EPA), the Jamaican Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade has released a chronology of the CARIFORUM EC/EPA negotiations
The Guyana government wants more time to consider "troubling" aspects of the Economic Partnership Agreement with the EU. "No Government can be deaf to the outcry of important groups in its society," Guyana's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Carolyn Rodrigues, said. "We are democracies, not command economies. If our populations do not believe the agreement is in their interest, if they believe it has been imposed upon them, it will not work."
Jamaica enacted legislation for the protection of GIs through the Protection of Geographical Indications Act of 2004. However, protection under the law strictly complies with the standards laid out in the TRIPS Agreement and does not contemplate the "TRIPS plus" and "TRIPS extra" elements incorporated in the EPA.
The ACP countries, by opening up their markets freely to European goods, services and companies will be transformed into a state of development via an impressive chain of unproven, theoretical assumptions. The EPA itself is replete with development rhetoric and references to the development objectives of the Agreement, most, if not all, of which are compromised by the content of the Agreement itself. Nowhere in the Agreement is there a direct, targeted attack on the basic supply-side problem, let alone binding commitments to put in place a complement of measures aimed at this problem.
Analyses the Cariforum-EC EPA from a critical standpoint, including the EPA architecture, what each side gets from the Agreement, the scope of binding commitments, the institutional machinery and the scope for revision of the Agreement. The points are illustrated with direct quotations from the EPA text.
While government officials promise the EPAs will bring more jobs and beef market openings for Botswana, Botswana unions believe they are nothing but recolonisation of ACP countries and say 'the EU is coming back to deplete our (African) resources'.
While the majority of Caricom governments have signalled readiness to sign the EPA, reservations remain strong enough. Meanwhile, conflicting signals keep coming out of Brussels.
Professor Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, on Tuesday urged the government of Ghana to "take a cold hard look" at the Economic Partnership Agreement and negotiate its inimical aspects away, saying that the deal was not free but an extremely managed trade agreement.
The historic Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) skilfully brokered last December between the Caribbean Forum of African, Caribbean and Pacific States (CARIFORUM) and the European Community (EC) is impressively wide in its scope, but the impact of its implementation in countries such as Jamaica is still largely unexplored.
