The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) was formed in 1964 to help developing countries access the benefits of a globalized economy more fairly and effectively. Approximately 30 years later (1995), the World Trade Organisation (WTO) was established to: (i) set rules for and regulate global trade and (ii) help developing countries improve their capacity to trade.
Ten years later in 2005, UNCTAD held a 3-day Expert Meeting on ‘Trade and Development Aspects of Professional Services and Regulatory Frameworks’ in Geneva. Barbados had two representatives at that meeting – one represented the Government and I represented the private sector. At the close of the meeting, Barbados received a special commendation for our contributions.
BEING PREPARED.
Our contributions to the meeting were due to our unique preparedness. In 2002, I was the Chairman of the Barbados Professional Services Export Committee, where about 25 national professional organisations tried trading in Canada, the USA and Mexico to identify the actual barriers to trade. On paper, those countries claimed they had no barriers, but in practice, several of their barriers made it impossible for us to trade in their countries. This exercise was done in preparation for the Free-Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) trade agreement which Barbados was expected to sign.
The result was a study worth $500,000 of our time (but freely donated) identifying: (i) the actual barriers to trade in those countries, (ii) the steps that each professional body needed to take for their members to be internationally competitive, and (iii) the recommended immediate, short and medium-term actions the Government needed to take to facilitate the export of Barbadian professional services in those countries.
THE BARBADOS FRAMEWORK.
For the next two years as President of the newly formed Barbados Coalition of Service Industries, we encouraged and supported all Barbadian stakeholders to become internationally competitive. By 2004, Barbados had perhaps the most comprehensive framework for negotiating trade agreements with other countries and were well prepared to meaningfully contribute to UNCTAD’s Expert Meeting.
The FTAA negotiations failed in 2005 because they could not reach agreement. If unfair trade barriers are allowed to remain, no deal is a lot better than a bad deal. Coincidently, the European Partnership Agreement was being negotiated in 2005. However, rather than use the proven Barbados framework, the Government chose perhaps the worst possible option for negotiating a trade agreement and generally ignored the recommendations of the Export Committee.
Twenty years later, in his maiden speech in the senate on 18 March 2025, the new Minister of Innovation, Science and Technology, Jonathan Reid, reportedly wants to make the Government internationally competitive – confirming that we essentially squandered the past 20 years.
FAIR AND UNFAIR TRADE.
Evidence of people trading is described in the earliest known writings in Sumer (4,000 BC) where quantities and costs of different materials and services were described. For thousands of years, fair trade between nations was the aim. That changed around 1,400 AD with the ‘European Age of Discovery’, where Europeans traded garbage for treasure in Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean and the Americas.
The treasure was gold, crafts and people. The garbage was the shells of sea snails. Europeans were able to exploit the ignorance of leaders of their ‘Discovered’ nations as they flooded the market with these shells in this unfair trade. When a neighbouring leader raised objections, the Europeans tended to destabilise relationships between those leaders by trading guns and garbage for treasure. The Europeans then colonised those weakened countries.
PROTECTING WEAKER ECONOMIES.
When European colonies became independent after World War 2, they were allowed to sell their products in the former coloniser’s country at higher-than-normal costs. This allowed them some certainty of foreign-currency income as they learnt to trade internationally. To protect weaker local companies from competing with stronger foreign companies, the WTO temporarily allowed developing countries to: (i) prevent and limit the access of foreign companies in the local market and (ii) add tariffs or taxes on foreign goods so that they were more expensive than the local products.
Strong foreign companies in developed countries want to access markets in less developed countries, since that is where many new opportunities exist. Such opportunities include: (i) building new infrastructure (air and sea ports, hospitals, sky-scrapers, road and utility networks, etc), (ii) extracting natural resources (metals, minerals, oil, gas, etc), (iii) competing with weaker companies, and (iv) finding additional consumers for their products.
TIME TO PREPARE.
The World Trade Organisation’s rules allow developing countries time to become internationally competitive. Barbados signed the European Partnership Agreement in 2008 – despite my dire warnings that it was an extremely unfair trade agreement. Essentially, we gave away our entire local market for ‘trinkets’ and allowed Europe to keep us out of their most lucrative markets with impossible trade barriers. Entertainers willing to sing for their supper were let in, but services that could feed many for years were cleverly kept out. To comply with the WTO’s rules, the EPA gave us 25 years to prepare – before we awaken to the nightmare.
We have squandered so much of this time that European Union representatives publicly and repeatedly expressed alarm at how little we have achieved. It seems that they want it on public-record that our non-preparation is entirely our fault – and it is. The Europeans seem to have used the same playbook they used during their Age of Discovery – only negotiate with leaders who shamelessly marvel at, and are distracted by their ‘trinkets’.
When the Europeans, US and Canada negotiate trade agreements, their negotiators are supported by their private sector on whose behalf the trade agreement is being negotiated. When we negotiate unfair trade agreements, we seem to treat our non-political private sector with disdain. When our negotiators appear at negotiation meetings without the critical private sector support, the foreign negotiators likely find it difficult to contain their good fortune.
TIME IS UP.
US President Trump has essentially decided that the preparation time given to developing countries is up. We were allowed decades to become internationally competitive and must now remove our ‘training wheels’ and demonstrate that we can ride in the global trading system.
Those countries who used the generous preparation time to make their governments and private sectors internationally competitive will likely do well. Those who politicised their public services by promoting people on party affiliation rather than merit, and who harmed their private sector by awarding corrupting no-bid contracts to party supporters, will likely struggle to keep up.
Grenville Phillips II is a Doctor of Engineering and a Chartered Structural Engineer. He can be reached at NextParty246@gmail.com
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