JCC will also be on the agenda

Dionisia Tabureguci
Reviving the United States/Pacific Islands Nations Joint Commercial Commission (JCC) is something that member countries of the Pacific Islands nations may want to see happen. But instead of trying to lobby for support from the United States, it has been suggested that they first try to help themselves. 

Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS) Secretary-General Greg Urwin told ISLANDS BUSINESS last month that JCC will feature on the agenda of the 2007 Pacific Islands Conference of Leaders, scheduled to be held in Washington D.C. this month. Attention on it will focus on a list of suggestions from PIFS on market mechanisms.

“As you know, the JCC has not done much benefit to the parties involved. The US is telling us not to invent new arrangements but to make use of what is already in place. But we will be taking to the US a list of suggestions on market mechanisms,” Urwin said.

The JCC was proposed by US President George Bush Snr at the United States-Pacific Islands Summit held in October 1990 at the East-West Centre in Hawaii. 

The MOU establishing it was signed on January 12, 1993 by the United States and the then 13 independent Pacific nations.

Although not strictly a trade arrangement, JCC is the closest the islands countries have with the US in relation to market access. 

The MOU, according to a speech delivered in Fiji in 2005 by former US ambassador to the Pacific, David Lyons, contained eight specific functions that relate to trade and investment, all of which were open to discussion within the JCC context.

“Included among them were provisions for information exchanges, dialogue mechanisms, education programmes, private-sector development, and monitoring programme effectiveness,” Lyons had said.

However, past efforts to make the JCC work for the islands have not quite amounted to substantial progress, and as time passed, the idea was relegated to the backburner as Pacific islands countries shifted efforts to pitching either for their own relationships with the US or other group access frameworks.

In his 2005 speech, Lyons pointed to the JCC as the Pacific’s best hope in getting somewhere with the US and that any effort to try for a duplication of something that the US already has with groups of countries in other regions is likely to be wasted.

JCC, he had said, was the Pacific’s best bet and that there were elements to it that merited more Pacific attention to get it up and running.

“One enormously valuable aspect of the JCC is that it very nearly approximates a TIFA, or Trade and Investment Framework Agreement.  TIFAs are not well known but they are de facto precursors for Free Trade Agreements or FTAs.  One American expert told me last year that the US will not negotiate an FTA with a country with which we do not already have a TIFA.” 

“As once described by Scott Kroeker, JCC official at the East-West Centre, on this revival effort to this magazine: “the objective is to find some small but symbolic victories that the JCC can point to in an effort to build momentum and support from all fronts.”

Two important suggestions that came out of this revival roadmap were:

• the identification, by both sides, of a limited range of goods and services that give specific focus to the JCC; and
• the identification of specific measures and actions that will create and facilitate trade and investment in the specific areas identified.

It was also mooted that a closer working relationship be developed between PIFS and as a result, PIFS was unofficially tasked with the role of getting the islands countries to come up with a list of products and services that could be developed and positioned into US market using JCC.

Not much progress however, has been achieved where this is concerned.

“Islands countries have been less enthusiastic in coming up with a list of products,” said Urwin.

“As you can see today (at the launch of the 2007 UNESCAP report in Fiji) it is up to PICs to develop themselves and create products.”

A flurry of economic assessment reports released by donor agencies recently showed the need for PICs to be more proactive and efficient in dealing with challenges in their economic, social and governance system.

Urwin said taking care of these issues and challenges would then create conducive environment for investment in potential sectors out of which new products and services may emerge and which could then be marketed to the US.

He said another issue PIFS will be talking to the US about this month is the possibility of having the islands nations gain access, as a collective body to the United States Millennium Challenge Account, an account set up by the United States in 2002 to help developing countries provided they “root out corruption, respect human rights and adhere to the rule of law, among other things.”