Regional trade ministers will begin a series of meetings this month aimed at deciding upon a market access offer to make to the European Union (EU) in response to the duty-free and quota-free market access offer that the European body made to the Caribbean earlier this year, as part of their Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) negotiations.

"Starting on September 17, we have a series of meetings culminating with a trade ministers meeting and those meetings are focused on the EPA negotiations, where we hope we will be able to complete the market access offer from our side in response to the European offer," head of the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (CRNM), Dr Richard Bernal, disclosed to the Business Observer yesterday.

The EU and African Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) countries are hastily attempting to complete talks, which began seven years ago, on a set of new agreements - EPAs - that will, as of January 1, 2008, govern trade and aid relations between the two blocs, after the World Trade Organisation made it clear the old arrangements of non-reciprocal preferential trade regimes could no longer work.

The ACP is broken up into six separate groups to negotiate with the EU based on geography. Cariforum, one of the groups, represents the Caribbean Community (Caricom) countries and the Dominican Republic.

In July the EU made an offer of duty-free and quota-free market access for all products except sugar, bananas and rice which have separate arrangements.

Dr Bernal said that the market access offer is the only major issue left to be ironed out in the negotiation process.
"We are behind (in the negotiations) on the critical core issue of market access and the objective of this series of meetings is that by the time we complete the ministerial meeting we will have a Cariforum market access offer," noted Dr Bernal. "That is the major issue right now, most of the other issues are well advanced."

The CRNM head said that the major challenges in coming up with a market access offer to the Europeans are: finding a common position among all the Cariforum countries; there is quite a substantial difference in tariff amount in the region; and any market offer that is made will require increased access to the Cariforum market and that will involve lowering tariffs which will cause an adverse fiscal impact.

Dr Bernal, despite acknowledging the timeliness of the meetings, made no guarantees that the two groups will be able to come to a consensus on an EPA before the deadline on December 31.

"We are up against a very tight schedule, we believe it is beneficial to finish on time, so we hope that this series of meetings will allow us to present our offer," said Dr Bernal. "We are still trying to make that deadline. all the meetings we have scheduled are working back from that December 31st date.

"We cannot guarantee that we will meet that date but we are trying to meet the schedule," he said.

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