Relations among The Bahamas and its CARICOM neighbours are not likely to become strained as a result of concern that some regional governments have expressed about the Petrocaribe oil deal, senior government officials said recently.
Under the Petrocaribe plan, Venezuela has agreed to provide fuel to Caribbean countries with special payment arrangements attached.
Following a recent meeting, the prime ministers of Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago agreed that Prime Minister Patrick Manning of oil-producing Trinidad and Tobago would travel to Venezuela to propose that provisions of the Petrocaribe deal be rewritten so that they do not conflict with the CARICOM treaty.
In those talks, the three leaders had reportedly pointed out that the Petrocaribe initiative could potentially conflict with provisions of both the original and revised treaties of Chaguaramas, which provide that all goods, except those which qualify for “Community treatment”, shall be subject to a common external tariff.
Regional newspapers also reported last week that CARICOM officials would seek to determine whether the Community’s rules were broken when 13 CARICOM countries signed the Petrocaribe oil deal in July.
The object of the study, CARICOM Secretary General Edwin Carrington said, is to determine whether Trinidad and Tobago – which currently produces in excess of 140,000 barrels of oil per day and sells a significant amount of oil to Caribbean countries – will be prejudiced by the arrangement.
According to Bahamas High Commissioner to CARICOM A. Leonard Archer, those developments are not necessarily likely to affect political or diplomatic relations around the region.
The pivotal factor in addressing the concerns, he said, is timely negotiations.
“What CARICOM is saying is because the CARICOM treaty arrangement is the principal arrangement the (Petrocaribe) arrangement will have to be in concurrence with the CARICOM treaty,” Mr. Archer said.
“That is what the (Caribbean countries) agreed to when they signed the CARICOM treaty. So essentially what they are doing is making sure that the provisions which have been agreed to in the Petrocaribe arrangement are in consonance with the main CARICOM treaty. It may require some modification of the Petrocaribe pact, but if that is required then I suspect that will be done.”
The high commissioner pointed out that this is not the first time that potential conflicts have developed between various trade arrangements and the Chaguaramas treaty.
Those challenges, he noted, were also addressed and resolved.
Trade and Industry Minister Leslie Miller, meanwhile, said he too is confident that the Petrocaribe initiative does not breach any of the rules of CARICOM.
Minister Miller said, however, that while he is not opposed to efforts to resolve any potential conflict by promoting a greater role for Trinidad in the Petrocaribe arrangement, there could be some difficulties with that plan.
“Our initial proposal almost three years ago was for Trinidad to process some of the crude, but the problem is that Trinidad does not have the processing capacity to lift the crude to Venezuela, process it and have sufficient to distribute to the entire Caribbean including The Bahamas,” he said.
Minister Miller also made the case once again for local officials to move ahead with establishing the proposed National Energy Corporation.
“On the 11th of October, the Government of Barbados made a conscious decision that the National Energy Corporation of Barbados would be the only entity responsible for pulling fuel for the people of Barbados,” Minister Miller said.
“In particular the Barbados NEC would be responsible for pulling the fuel that is used by the Barbadian electricity corporation. The government has therefore taken that away (from private energy companies) which is going to save the Barbados government and people in excess of US$5 million to US$7 million per annum I am told.
“That’s exactly what we are trying to do in implementing the NEC of The Bahamas – exactly the same thing.”
Minister Miller said while he had predicted earlier this year that the domestic NEC would have been established by September 2005 one could only “do your best”.
By: Darrin Culmer, The Bahama Journal
