Caribbean Nations Find Little Profit in Aiding U.S. Drug War
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Hoping for American gratitude and assistance, the English-speaking countries of the eastern Caribbean have in recent years devoted larger portions of their meager budgets to fighting drug trafficking. But now, to the dismay of many in the region, the United States is responding with a policy of economic retrenchment. Legislation to give Caribbean countries the same free-trade benefits as Mexico and Canada has been shelved in Congress, and a little-noticed provision of the minimum-wage bill that President Clinton signed in August eliminates Federal tax incentives to encourage low-interest loans to the region. Also, the two sides are in a bitter dispute over export quotas for bananas, the backbone of most economies in the area. ”What is the message being sent?” Keith Mitchell, the Prime Minister of Grenada, asked. ”It is that our friends are abandoning us, that the rug is being pulled from under us, that we are being told we must sink or float on our own.” The scaling back of Washington’s economic commitment comes with the region’s re-emergence as a favorite transit zone for cocaine and heroin traffickers. Caribbean countries are largely cooperating with antidrug efforts, United States officials say, and their leaders are clearly rankled by what they see as a lack of American economic support. ”We’ve surrendered our sovereignty,” James Mitchell, Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, said at a recent meeting of the Caribbean Americas Business Network in Miami. ”We’ve given the U.S. all the cooperation in the world. What else do they want?” American officials acknowledge some of the complaints, but they also say that eastern Caribbean nations have passed up opportunities through membership in regional lending institutions to ease their economic dependence on Washington. For their part, leaders of the 14 nations making up the Caribbean Community, a regional economic association known as Caricom, have been urging the Clinton Administration to grant them trade parity with Mexico and Canada, the United States’ partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement. But Congress adjourned this month without taking action on the measure, which was intended to supplement the largely moribund Caribbean Basin Initiative created by the Reagan Administration. In a report last month, the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a Washington-based research group, attributed the delay in action to ”partisan and special interest opposition” in Congress. The council said American legislators were wary of offending fruit lobbyists. Caricom leaders say they need access to free trade to help compensate for a drop of nearly 90 percent in American economic assistance to the region over the last decade, from $225 million to $26 million. In August, a provision in the new minimum-wage law ended tax breaks for American corporations doing business in Puerto Rico. At the same time, Washington is challenging the traditional system of trade preferences that allows many Caricom nations to export their products to European nations either duty free or at vastly reduced tariff rates. One such proposal, which Caribbean leaders say could cripple the region’s banana industry, is now before the World Trade Organization. ”It seems shortsighted and baffling,” said Frank Alleyne of the Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the West Indies. ”What about the cost in social unrest? If they succeed, drug cultivation will increase, mark my word. Farmers must find another crop, and that crop is marijuana.” More : query.nytimes.com |