Missed meeting a ‘painful’ loss
by Tony Best
It was a painful and costly mistake, and Caribbean nations should ensure they have learned a lesson. The lesson, say Carlston Boucher, Barbados’ Ambassador to the United Nations, Cassius Elias, St. Lucia’s Minister of Agriculture, and his counterpart in Grenada, Michael Baptiste, is that although attendance at international meetings in different capitals of the world may be costly to Caribbean states they can’t afford to be absent from them either. “We can’t afford to stay away,” said Boucher. And the example which the three Caribbean officials cited was what happened to the Eastern Caribbean when they failed to be represented at the talks which led to the creation of the World Trade Organization. Because they stayed away due to the cost of sending delegates to the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations that fashioned the WTO, the interest of the Caribbean and most of the world’s other smaller nations weren’t adequately protected. So, when Washington challenged the European Union’s banana regime by taking the issue to the WTO, the Caribbean banana-producing nations ended up the losers. “The WTO is a lesson I think we have learnt painfully,” asserted Boucher. “Small island-states didn’t cover the WTO negotiations in any serious fashion. It took seven years to negotiate the Uruguay Round, and very few small island states were in their chairs there. Some aren’t even members of WTO or the GATT,” the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. “The lesson we must draw from that is, yes, it is expensive, and we may have to be selective,” he added. “But we as a group of nations must be in our chair in those processes. We cannot expect other countries to put a case for us. The big countries as well as India, Brazil Mexico, Indonesia, and Pakistan dominated the Uruguay Round. They took the lead in those negotiations. We can’t expect them to fight the case for small islands.” That was why the Caribbean must “find ways to be represented effectively” at these international meetings, especially those dealing with trade. Both Baptiste and Elias used the WTO problem to articulate their countries’ case for being members of the International Whaling Commission, an international body which was created to manage the utilization of the world’s whale stocks. Baptiste said that his country and its Eastern Caribbean neighbours saw the need to be IWC members because of the critical issues involving the way the world’s fishing resources were being managed and utilized. “We should have learned from the WTO experience with bananas,” Baptiste told Caribbean journalists in Grenada who attended a symposium on whaling that was held a day before the IWC annual meeting opened in St. George’s. During the first day of deliberations of the whaling conference, Elias said that if Caribbean states weren’t present at the IWC meetings, several decisions affecting small cetaceans and other species of fish would be made without any Caribbean input. 
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