THE junior agriculture minister, Errol Ennis, stopped just short of accusing officials of foppish incompetence for leading the country into the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in the early 1990s without a full grasp of what they were signing on to.

In fact, at a farmer’s conference on Wednesday, Ennis joined in a broadside against officials for excluding the private sector and farmers in the Uruguay Round of trade talks that led to the creation of the WTO and the opening of Jamaican markets to exports. He referred to the WTO treaty as “that thing”.

“We had no right to have signed that thing without knowing what it was about because they (negotiators and the Government) didn’t know what it was about,” Ennis told the conference of the Kingston and St Andrew branch of the Jamaica Agricultural Society (JAS). “And we didn’t know what it was about because we went there (to the negotiations) unprepared. The civil servants and everybody just go there drink tea and sign off without telling the Jamaican people of the consequences.”

The Uruguay Round opened in 1986 when Edward Seaga’s Jamaica Labour Party was in office.

But while most of the negotiations for the regimes to liberalise world trade happened during the period of the Seaga government, it was the People’s National Party, which returned to office in 1989, that actually took Jamaica into the WTO. Jamaica liberalised its market faster than most of its Caribbean Community colleagues and, in some cases, ahead of WTO timetables.

While other Jamaican officials have conceded that inexperience and a deficit of technical capacity placed the Caribbean and other developing countries at a disadvantage in trade talks, no one in the government has been as harsh as Ennis in criticising what was done.

“(It is) not that we could have stayed out (of the WTO),” Ennis said. “But the point that bothers me is that if we had invited the private sector, invited the farmers to study this thing and see how we could approach it, we would probably have done a better job.”

Like in many developing countries, some Jamaican producers, including farmers, have argued that their businesses were being affected by imports from rich countries, with the cash and markets to invest in technology. At the same time, those countries find ways to restrict the exports from developing countries.

In recent years, however, Jamaica has implemented anti-dumping and other safeguard mechanisms to protect its industries, particularly farmers. But most still complain of their inability to compete.

However, at a new round of global trade talks launched at Doha, Qatar in late 2001, developed countries agreed to implement undertakings from the earlier round that support developing countries as well as signing on the concept of “special and differential treatment” for small states.

At the same time, the Caribbean Community (Caricom) countries, through a vehicle called the Regional Negotiating Machinery (RNM), currently headed by Jamaican Richard Bernal, have pulled their international trade negotiations under a single umbrella.

But the RNM and Bernal still came in for a lambasting at Tuesday’s conference by JAS vice-president, Bob Miller.

Miller claimed that despite Bernal having admitted in a recent radio interview that the region’s negotiator were ill-prepared for the early round of the world trade negotiations, farmers were still not being brought into the loop this time.

“Dem think say we a idiot,” he declared, using the Jamaican vernacular.