PRESIDENT of the Republic of Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo, yesterday hit out at globalisation, saying it was only beneficial to those countries with a gateway to a large capital base and modern markets.

“Globalisation is being portrayed by many as a panacea for all of our problems, but globalisation benefits those countries that have access to capital and developed markets,” Jagdeo said on the closing day of the 50th staging of the Denbigh Agri-Industrial Show in Clarendon.

“Many of those countries, despite the developed state of their economies, are putting many, many barriers to products from our markets,” the Guyanese head of state stated.

Jagdeo is one of the Patterson administration’s three VIP guests here for celebrations marking Jamaica’s 40th anniversary of Independence. The others are Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo and world heavyweight boxing champion Lennox Lewis.

Last week, Jagdeo was in the island for Emancipation Day celebrations and attended the Westmoreland Home-coming Committee’s awards banquet in Negril.

Yesterday, he announced that there were a series of negotiations taking place within the Free Trade Area of the Americas, The World Trade Organisation and the African, Caribbean and Pacific group on how to tackle the obstacles that globalisation is placing before developing countries.

“If we are not careful,” said Jagdeo, “we will find that our agricultural sector and our economies will be forever marginalised. We have made it clear to our negotiating partners that we are not prepared to sacrifice our agriculture on the altar of dogmatic concepts of free trade.”

He promised that the region will not make concessions that will damage the livelihood of thousands of farmers, while subsidies of a billion dollars a day are being pumped into the agricultural sectors of developed countries.

“When these countries stop sending subsidised poultry, rice, onions, potatoes, milk and other products into our market, then and only then will we be able to be in a position to reconsider our tariff on these products,” the Guyanese president said.

He argued that the term ‘special and preferential treatment’ must mean that vulnerable economies must be able to offer protection to their farmers from the destructive practices of global agricultural trade. That protection, he said, was the import tariffs, and the region was not giving that up easily.

The Caricom Single Market and Economy, he said, was a very important issue for the region, given that it will allow several products to be traded in greater volumes within Caricom.

“If we don’t take care of our own trading space, then we certainly cannot expect others to do it for us,” Jagdeo said. “There are those out there who would be only too happy to see our agriculture fail, since they regard us as only a supermarket for their products.”

He pointed to the sugar industry, saying that the region has invested too much in terms of capital and human resources to allow it to go to waste.

Said he: “The sugar industry provides a range of non-trade returns to the economy and if we allow it to fail the consequences will be unimaginable.”

However, he lamented the fact that after centuries as a sugar producing region, most of the refined sugar that is used within Caricom is imported from outside.

Jagdeo also insisted that it was the duty of the region to ensure that our capacity to inspect and verify the quality of imported food is strengthened, so that we do not become a dumping ground for low quality and unsafe foods.