A trade specialist has knocked the Caribbean for focusing on tariffs in free trade agreement (FTA) negotiations when non-tariff barriers were of more concern to the region’s exporters.
According to Sacha Silva, who served as technical advisor to the CARIFORUM-European Union Economic Partnership Agreement negotiating team, trade negotiations are long and exhausting and create very high expectations.
“When we spend six years negotiating an agreement people expect results. Even simple South-South free trade agreements can dominate the work of a trade official for three or four years,” he said.
The economist with WTI Advisors, a division of the World Trade Institute, said FTAs were highly limited instruments in any context but especially in the Caribbean.
He made the comments last Wednesday at Hilton Barbados during a Caribbean Exporters Colloquium hosted by the Caribbean Export Development Agency.
“If you ask a lot of the exporters what the main problems are that they face in accessing markets it’s not usually the issue of tariffs . . . .
“They will talk to you about non-tariff barriers. They will talk to you about the 16 different technical requirements that the Barbadian exporter of pepper sauce faces in Europe including four different labelling requirements,” he said, also citing financing and infrastructural issues.
Silva said there was also “fear of the unknown” when it came to services agreements because of the lack of data.
“It is harder to get a sense of what the impact of a services agreement is so governments instinctively shy away from this.
“For me one of the real problems here in the region is the lack of services data and that feeds into things like the CSME regime,” he said.
Silva suggested that the region should focus FTA negotiations on a few key areas instead of going though “grand exercises”. (NB)
