Overview of Trade Liberalization and the Impact on Small Economies

Ms Eline Ggraanoogst, Deputy Director in the Ministry of Trade, Suriname, delivered the Keynote Address. She began by quoting the preamble to the WTO Agreement, and situating Globalization and Trade Liberalization and the impact on our region.

“The Parties to this Agreement, recognizing that their relationship in the field of trade and economic endeavor should be conducted with a view to raising standards of living, ensuring full employment and a large and steadily growing volume of real income and effective demand, and expanding the production of and trade in goods and services, while allowing for optimal use of the world’s resources in accordance with the objective of sustainable development, seeking both to protect and preserve the environment and to enhance the means for doing so in a manner consistent with their respective needs and concerns at different levels of economic development”.

The Preamble further recognizes “that there is need for efforts designed to ensure that developing countries, and especially the least developed among them, secure a share in the growth in international trade commensurate with the needs of their economic development” .

With this in mind, our Heads of States or representatives aboard, signed the WTO Agreement in 1994/1995, together with over 120 country representatives from other developing countries as well as developed countries.

By doing so, they deliberatively directed the global economic environment, as the process of liberalization was further set into motion.

At the same time, countries in this hemisphere, including the Caribbean, Latin American and South American countries, the USA, Canada and Mexico, at the Summit of the Americas in Miami, agreed upon a process of forming a Free Trade Area of the Americas, the so called FTAA.

And by signing on to these agreements, our governments plunged us into a serious adventure. Because, in essence it was agreed, that members would open up their markets and economies for each other, without discrimination, for trade and investments, rules should be more transparent, the removal or restriction of trade and non trade barriers etc. etc. And we, the individuals, national of the Caribbean were hardly aware of what was coming onto us.

Since then, the global economic order is thus denominated by two concepts and their practical application, namely liberalization and globalization.

Though they are different things, for liberalization is a global policy prescription and globalization is a phenomenon that stems partly from the application of that prescription as well as from other causes like the information and technology revolution, these two concepts are interrelated”.

Se went on to say that the gap in living standards has widened between the rich and the poor, and Caribbean people are experiencing a threat to our small societies and fragile economies at the level of bananas, rice and sugar. Within this, women are a disadvantaged position when it comes to access to jobs, access to financing, land, property, knowledge, research and technology, and the factors that constitute economic development.

She said that Caribbean women need to have something to trade, and put out of the following challenging questions, and recommendation “What do we have as Caribbean women to trade. How will we deal with this problem of trade. We will still stick to our banana, rice, sugar, handicrafts and be entertainers and servants for the developed countries, as we have been for centuries now. Or don’t think that it is time for a somersault in our thinking and that we need to transcend. Don’t we need to transcend our level of creativity and go beyond the destiny that our colonial masters molded into us, namely producers of basic and primary products.

I feel that it’s time to think about our destiny as Caribbean people and Caribbean women in particular, and redesign our destiny”.