Can President Jagdeo comment on what Mr. Brew said?

Oct 14, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

As President Jagdeo gets more intense about the sour deal that the Caribbean got from the EPA, questions are spiralling out of control as to just what has caused President Jagdeo to do a late rejection of the EPA. By late we mean that the accord was concluded in December 2007.

Now BBC Caribbean Radio has carried a report that will necessitate a response from Mr. Jagdeo. I listened to the interview myself.

Mr. Dougie Brew, Trade Policy Adviser to the European Union, told the BBC that, as late as March this year, Guyana was one of the strongest supporters of the EPA.

Mr. Brew went further to say that Guyana, at that time, wrote the EU to praise the agreement, and even asked for the EU’s help in facilitating the implementation of the EPA.

By the time this article comes out, other media houses would have worked on the Brew interview. Of course, it does not mean Mr. Brew is correct in what he says. He could have misinterpreted what was written in March.

President Jagdeo and his Minister of International Trade and/or his Minister of Finance should speak to the press and tell us exactly what they think of the Brew statement.

Could the Government of Guyana state who the person was that wrote the EU in March? What was the content of that correspondence?

Surely, it is stretching things very far to classify Mr. Brew as a liar. And what could be in that communication that was so complex and ambiguous for Mr. Brew to misinterpret what was written?

So, it is up to the analyst to put his/her interpretation to what Brew said. My position as a commentator is either to believe or reject what Brew told his interviewer.

Since Mr. Brew was speaking in his capacity as Trade Policy Advisor of the EU, for him to just tell a plain lie on a CARICOM country would be hard to accept.

Also, he said that Guyana wrote the EU in a positive way about the EPA. So, if you challenge Mr. Brew, there is still a written document to which we can resort.

Something is not right here. If President Jagdeo supported the EPA in March, then what could have happened in April, May, and June for President Jagdeo to have changed his mind, because it was in July that the President announced he would not sign and that he would have consultations on the EPA. Let me repeat: something is not right about Mr. Jagdeo’s timing and, by extension, his anti-EPA crusade.

Then, of course, we have Professor Thomas, who wrote in his Stabroek News column that he couldn’t understand how people could say that the weaknesses in the EPA were only now spotted when he, Thomas, had written about its non-starters months before.

My point is why did President Jagdeo’s Government get in touch with the EU in March, praising the EPA, then ignored the months of anti-EPA columns by Thomas, only to state in July that he finds the EPA a flawed arrangement? Before we search for an answer, two other strange things need to be mentioned.

First, one cannot be serious to say that President Jagdeo held meaningful consultations with stakeholders.

I was really shocked and truly amazed to read that Professor Clive Thomas thinks that the consultations were successful.

For a man with over forty years of political activism, he should have known better. The EPA consultation was held for one day, and participation from stakeholders took up roughly three hours.

Do you call that meaningful consultation? The second strange thing is that President Jagdeo chose to be in China rather than at the ACP meeting.

Since he is the Guyanese Head of State, and since he is championing a rearranged EPA, it was morally incumbent for him to be at the ACP meeting in person to seek a delay in signing.

We now come to a possible reason for the anti-EPA crusade. The Government has enacted a committee to look at the performance of the sugar estates.

My belief is that the Government has to follow the World Bank edict that it closes the Demerara sugar estates.

That is political suicide, but it has to be done. The Demerara sugar estates died the day the Skeldon modernization began.

The Government will explain the closure to its supporters by saying that the EPA is the reason, and that it tried to fight the EPA, but CARICOM failed to support it.

I will not be surprised if a racial argument is given to sugar workers in terms of what CARICOM did. Let’s wait and see how this one plays out.

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Can President Jagdeo comment on what Mr. Brew said?

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