ACP Meeting
With ACP Over, The Real Test For Qarase Begins
What can we expect from the new ACP President?
When Fiji's Prime Minister Laisenia Qarase took over as President of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) bloc of nations, he wanted to know whether the 600 delegates at the 3rd ACP summit he hosted last month at a Fijian resort had heard the drums. The drumbeat he told them was insistent and would not be silenced. "Do you hear the drumbeat from the mountains and plains of Africa, from the shinning sands of the Caribbean and our islands and atolls of the Pacific," he asked summiteers.
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Four days later, Qarase emerged with a 94-point communique now known as the Nadi Declaration, proof that the drums had indeed been sounded.
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But whether the resonance was loud enough to reverberate beyond the confines of the air-conditioned conference room of the Sheraton Resort in the Fijian town of Nadi, is hard to say.
The real test would come when Qarase leads the ACP into the forthcoming world summit on sustainable development that will be held in Johannesburg later this month. The biggest test though would come a month later when Qarase, as the current ACP President, heads the regional grouping's negotiations for economic partnership agreements with the European Union as provided for under the Cotonou Agreement. This multilateral trade agreement links the 78 members of the ACP with the European Union.
Ironically, the Fiji summit will perhaps be remembered as the meeting that almost didn't go ahead. The rather small media contingent got an inkling of this when the ACP Council of Ministers session that preceded the summit did not begin as scheduled. It was only in the post-session briefing that evening that session chairman, Fiji's Foreign Minister, Kaliopate Tavola, explained the reason for the two-hour delay.
Madagascar's exiled President Didier Ratsiraka had sent an envoy to the Nadi meeting. Given the recent African Union's decision not to recognise both claimants of the presidency in Madagascar, it was felt the seat of this Indian Ocean nation in the ACP should be left vacant for the time being.
The Council of Ministers session only got started when Ratsiraka's envoy, Marcel Ranjeva reluctantly agreed to leave the conference room. Though Tavola was visibly relieved, the summit never recovered from that two-hour delay.
His drafting committee had to burn the midnight oil on Wednesday and Thursday to come up with a draft of the Nadi Declaration. Even the summit of heads of states and governments dragged on to the final day on Friday.
In joining his President in welcoming delegates, Qarase shot down the notion that free trade means trading from the same basis of equality and fairness. The open market, he says, is more like a steep and slippery slope.
What the Fijian PM failed to add is that the slope is steep and slippery even within the ACP members, particularly the smaller members.
With the European Union throwing in intra-ACP trade as a prerequisite for development aid between it and the ACP, smaller nations like Tuvalu, Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia and Niue fear that they have more to lose than gain from a regional trade regime like PICTA, the Pacific Islands Trade Agreement and PACER, the Pacific Agreement on Close Economic Relations.
Delegates of these smaller countries, who were at the Fiji summit, also fear that only bigger economies like Papua New Guinea and Fiji stand to benefit from intra-regional trade. Their small and mostly inefficient domestic industries will fold up when their markets are opened up to foreign competition.
There will also be massive redundancies in economies where creating new jobs is a daily struggle. More troubling though would be the huge loss in tax revenue from reduced import duty rates as required by the World Trade Organization.
European Union's (EU) Trade Commissioner, Pascal Lamy, who was at the Nadi summit as an invited guest, acknowledged the EU is well aware of such concerns. But it would be for ACP countries to come up with solutions.
This, the ACP summit attempted to do through the Nadi Declaration when it reiterated that trade liberalization should be "phased and sequenced in a progressive manner" and "accompanied by adequate supportive measures that address supply-side constraints, improve competitiveness and strengthen the capacity to trade."
The strengthening of "special and differential treatment" should be the fundamental principle of any multilateral trading system, it added. But in what form that special and differential treatment will take was not specified and has yet to be thrashed out. It was something many small island nations delegates were not comfortable with.
Global Fund contribution: There were movements in other matters. Like the African nations managed to get the Nadi Declaration to push for developed countries and multilateral financial institutions to cancel the mounting debts of ACP member states. The development of the "home-grown", New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) was also welcomed as well as the announcement that the ACP would contribute 60 million Euros to the Global Fund on HIV/AIDS.
Caribbean members succeeded in getting the endorsement of its Single Market and Economy Initiative, and would join its Pacific islands counterparts in the call for developed nations to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and for the adoption of a common fisheries policy.
Fiji as host got the ACP summit's approval in expressing strong objection to the transportation of nuclear and other hazardous materials through the waters of ACP states.
By the end of last month, Qarase and his officials were still trying to count the total cost of hosting the 3rd ACP Summit. Observers say the bill could easily reach F$6 million. The onus will be on Qarase as ACP President for the next two years to convert that sum into money well spent for his country and that of the other 77-member countries of the regional body.
Otherwise, the ACP would be reduced to being what Qarase had alluded to in his address: just the mere sounds of drums. No more, no less.
