STATEMENT
By SIR RONALD MICHAEL SANDERS
CHIEF FOREIGN AFFAIRS REPRESENTATIVE WITH MINISTERIAL RANK
OF ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA
TO GROUP ON DEVELOPMENT ISSUES
AT 5TH MINISTERIAL CONFERENCE OF THE WORLD TRADE ORGANISATION
IN CANCUN, MEXICO
ON 12TH SEPTEMBER 2003

I preface my remarks, as I have done in meetings of other groups at this conference, by pointing out that Antigua and Barbuda is a small island state of less than 100,000 people, whose economy is fully open and fully liberalized in terms of imports from all over the world.

We have no exports of agricultural products or manufactured goods of any significance whatsoever. Indeed, we import over 90% of what we eat or utilize in other ways.
Tariffs are important to us.

Since we cannot satisfy our own domestic needs for food, clothing, construction and so on, we do not use tariffs as a means of protection for domestic products.

Tariffs, for us, is a revenue measure without which we could not deliver the goods and services our people have a right to expect.

We would like this Conference to be sensitive to the importance of tariffs to the survival of our country, and to agree that small island countries that have a high tariff dependence would not be subject to the punitive requirement of tariff reduction or elimination.

My delegation will now address two paragraphs of the draft Ministerial text. These are paragraphs 27 on Coherence and paragraph 23 on Technical Cooperation.

With regard to paragraph 27 on Coherence, this paragraph is linked to the provision of technical assistance. While we appreciate the initiative of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to intervene in countries which are adversely affected by the challenges of the Doha Development round, we find it difficult to accept that small countries, which are capacity and resource constrained, should have to borrow to pay for the fulfillment of responsibilities imposed by the DDA.

While we note the offer by the IMF and the World Bank to "provide support in mobilizing donor resources", it seems that we would be required to borrow the greatest portion of funding requirements.

In reality, this is a form of taxation on our people to pay for the implementation of the DDA. For we will have to raise additional monies to repay the IMF/World Bank institutions.

For a small, very open economy such as ours, which is already fully liberalized in terms of its imports, we are being asked to suffer twice. First from the loss of revenues from tariffs and then from the loans we would have to repay in order to execute institutional reform and new forms of revenue raising measures.

Antigua and Barbuda is also concerned that the money available from the IMF/World Bank may not be new money, but a relocation of existing resources. In any event, even if it is new money, we remain concerned that its main component is loan rather than grant funds.

In this connection - and turning to paragraph 23 - we request that special attention be paid to technical assistance provisions for small developing countries whose vulnerabilities place them in circumstances similar to LDC's.

The present technical assistance provisions of the WTO Secretariat have fallen short of the ambition to assist developing countries effectively. This is due to the short term nature of such provisions despite the fact that trade liberalization is a long term process.

Technical assistance must be pragmatic and deal with both implementation of the WTO agreements, and adjustment costs due to trade liberalization.

Many of the WTO Agreements have technical assistance provisions, where developed countries are required to provide the enabling environment to allow developing countries to participate beneficially in the multilateral trading process. But they are not being operationalized and implemented.

As an example, Article 9 of the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures reads in part, "Members agree to facilitate the provision of technical assistance to other Members, especially developing country Members, either bilaterally or through the appropriate international organizations. Such assistance may be, inter alia, in the areas of processing technologies, research and infrastructure…"

Mr Chairman, we are asking developed countries to operationalise these technical assistance provisions which are already available in many of the Agreements and to which they have already committed themselves.

It would be beneficial if this Ministerial Conference would so agree.