The West has spent significant amounts of money for the reconstruction of the Balkans. Overall assistance to southeastern Europe was significant, ranging between €6-6.5 billion per annum from 1995-2006. Aid peaked twice, as a response to post-conflict reconstruction: first in 1995-1997 due to the significant assistance given to Bosnia and Herzegovina (following the signing of the Dayton Peace Accords) and secondly in 2001-2002 due to the considerable amounts of aid given to Kosovo after the NATO bombings. Bosnia received massive amounts of humanitarian and reconstruction assistance. On average the country received about $730 million per year from 1996-2002. At $1,400 per head, assistance in the first two post-war years in Bosnia was higher than any other international state-building project since the Second World War. Kosovo also received massive amounts of financial aid in the 1999-2004 period: about $3.1 billion of international aid targeted mostly humanitarian priorities and helped rebuild most of the 120,000 houses destroyed in the violence. Significant assistance was also provided to Serbia after the end of the Milosevic era: from 2000-2005, Serbia received more the $3.5 billion. In total, throughout the last twenty years the European Union (European Commission and the member-states) provided about 66% of the assistance for the reconstruction of western Balkans and the United States about 15%. With regard to the relevant burden of the European Community and its member states, and with few exceptions (like Yugoslavia and Romania from 1991-1999), Community contributions were higher to much higher than all EU member states bilateral efforts taken together.

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To be clear, EPA is not called Economic Partnership Agreement for nothing. It is a not a Development Aid package but rather a trade agreement, one of many, such as its predecessor the Cotonou Agreement signed in 2000. EPA seeks to realign the business/trade relationships which were granted to ACP countries under a preferential agreement, reached at time of the signing of the entry of the UK to the European Union in 1972. In time, there has been a gradual change of these preferential trade relations between the Caribbean, African and Pacific regions and the EU. This is evident, amongst others, from the downturn in the regions’ sugar and banana industries.

The concerns voiced by the academics is typical of a “reactive approach” taken by peoples of our region. The academics claimed that representatives have made the deal of EPA with their eyes wide shut. The truth is, it is not for the representatives to make deals. They are channels of information. It is for the elected Caribbean leaders to make sensible decisions on our behalf. At this point, leaders are aware, or at least should have been aware, of the consequences of the UK’s membership of the EU. There was time enough, more than 30 years, in which our leaders should have created a strategic plan in which Jamaica, after almost 46 years of independence, would have been able to step up to the challenges of playing ball on an unlevel international field.

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