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Robert Persaud seeks to reassure us, but about the wrong risk
Dear Editor,
Foreign Secretary Robert Persaud’s statement on the United States’ 12.5 percent tariff, quoted in Demerara Waves, answers a charge the Americans did not make. The action taken by the United States Trade Representative, Ambassador Jamieson Greer, under section 301 of the US Trade Act is not a finding that Guyanese goods are made with forced labour. It is a finding that Guyana, with fifty-nine other economies, has failed to impose and effectively enforce a prohibition on the importation of goods produced with forced labour. The charge concerns our statute book, not our exports.
Yet Mr. Persaud assures us there is no evidence of forced labour in Guyana, and our delegation told the US Trade Representative (USTR) hearings that more than 2,000 labour inspections substantiated nothing. Whether offending goods have crossed our borders is beside the point when the complaint is that we have no law to stop them. Our Permanent Secretary is reported to have gone further, citing the Minister’s power to prohibit importation where forced labour is conclusively determined. A discretionary power contingent on conclusive proof is the precise opposite of an enforced prohibition. That is why we sit at 12.5 percent and not 10.
There were two rates. Partners committing to adopt and enforce a prohibition received 10 percent; those that had not enacted one received 12.5. Ten gave that commitment within their Agreements on Reciprocal Trade; others legislated within weeks of the investigations opening on 12 March. Mr. Persaud tells us we are working to finalise an agreement on reciprocal trade. The clause that would have secured the lower rate sits inside the very instrument he says we are negotiating.
The question is whether we were told, anytime between March and July. If we were not, the relationship is not what Mr. Persaud makes it out to be. And if we were, then here is just another case of indecision, procrastination or incompetence. Duplication of functions, unfortunately, do not lead to efficiency but to confusion.
Mr. Persaud invokes the strength and maturity of the United States–Guyana relationship. Australia, one of America’s closest military allies, pays the same 12.5 percent we do. Canada, a free trade partner, was this week threatened with 50 percent duties on a range of goods under Section 338 of the Tariff Act of 1930, a provision unused for ninety-six years. Yet Canada and Mexico are better placed than we are, because the US President extracted forced-labour prohibitions from them in the USMCA. They hold an instrument. We pose for photographs at the White House and on warship decks.
Finally, Mr. Persaud seeks to reassure us, but about the wrong risk. A tariff is a price. The American forced-labour import ban is exclusion: Customs and Border Protection detained Serbian copper and Jordanian apparel in June. It operates irrespective of tariff treatment and reaches gold, timber and fish. Given our minimum wage and our failure to regulate how migrant workers are treated, Mr. Persaud’s assurance that exporters face no new burden may prove the least durable sentence in his statement.
Christopher Ram
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