THE Jamaican government yesterday repeated its plea for more time – and money – to restructure its sugar industry, while farmers and trade unions took their case against the European Union’s proposed three-year timetable for a 37 per cent cut in the price it pays for ACP sugar to EU missions in Kingston.

“The implementation period is too short and the reduction too drastic,” the island’s foreign affairs and foreign trade minister, K D Knight, complained at a press conference.

However, Knight, in the absence of the details, declined to comment on a preliminary decision by a World Trade Organisation dispute panel against the EU’s sugar arrangements – a ruling that appears to be detrimental to Jamaica and other ACP members.

While Knight was speaking to reporters yesterday, officials of the three trade unions – Bustamante Industrial Trade Union (BITU), National Workers Union (NWU), University and Allied Workers Union (UAWU) – led a small band of demonstrators to the offices of the EU delegation to Jamaica, as well as to embassies of Germany and Britain to dramatise their fear over economic dislocation and job losses from precipitate action.

The delegation held separate discussions with diplomats at each of the missions.

“We achieved what we set out to do, we got the ambassadors to send messages to their respective [nations]….,” said Dr Trevor Munroe, the president of the UAWU.

Munroe’s union, along with the BITU and NWU, represent the estimated 40,000 people directly employed in Jamaica’s sugar sector.

Jamaica and other members of the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of countries, which have an aid and trade pact with the EU, have been concerned by the plan unveiled by Brussels in June for the reorganisation of the preferential arrangement under which the ACP nations sell sugar to Europe.

The plan would kick in next year, leading, by 2007, to the 37 per cent drop in the guaranteed price the ACP countries receive for sugar. Jamaica, which has an EU sugar quota of 126,000 tons a year, earns about US$100 million from its sugar exports.

European beet sugar producers, to whose earnings the price paid to ACP producers is linked, would also, on the face of it, suffer a price reduction. However, the European producers would likely benefit from a compensation that would in effect reimburse them for up to 60 per cent of their lost earnings.

Knight declined to outline any specific proposals that Jamaica intends to put to the Europeans, saying that Caribbean sugar producers would meet in September to hammer out the details of their plan.

But he made it clear that the three-year phase-down period the Europeans have placed on the table was too short, that the proposed cut in prices was too deep and the Caribbean would probably look to Europe for some form of compensatory scheme, other than existing aid packages, to cushion the impact of a loss of earnings.

“If there is a compensatory package, it cannot be out of the EDF (the development fund the EU now provides for ACP countries),” Knight said.

Similar arguments were taken by the trade union leaders to Gerd Jarchow, the head of the EU delegation to Jamaica; Dr Christian Hausmann, the German ambassador; and Phil Sinkinson, Britain’s deputy high commissioner.

The trade unionists left feeling that they had received a sympathetic hearing and that the depth of their concerns would be transmitted to European capitals.

“The German ambassador pointed out that the plan to drop the price of sugar is not even a proposal but a communiqué and if it is to occur that it would have to be balanced with some sort of assistance,” said the NWU’s island supervisor, Vincent Morrison.

Added the UAWU’s Munroe: “We are not asking for a handout, what we want is justice. The agreement says that we are entitled to a reasonable price for our sugar.

“A 37 per cent cut is not reasonable. Three years is not reasonable. We need more time.”

Faced with the combination of the EU’s price proposal and the WTO’s ruling, which is based on complaints from three of the world’s biggest producers – Brazil, Thailand and Australia – Knight said it was clear that Jamaica would have to accelerate its restructuring of its sugar industry.

“I do accept that greater urgency ought to have attended the restructuring,” he conceded.