Reviving JCC will depend on island nations: Urwin

The elusive United States/Pacific Island Nations Joint Commercial Commission

By Dionisia Tabureguci

REVIVING the United States/Pacific Island Nations Joint Commercial Commission (JCC) is something that Pacific Island Countries (PICs) may want to see happen but instead of trying to lobby for support from the US, 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 the 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 to establish it was signed on January 12, 1993 by the United States and the then 13 independent Pacific nations.
Although not strictly a trade arrangement, the JCC is the closest that PICs have come to collectively having any form of market access mechanism with the US.
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 programs, private-sector development, and monitoring program 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 had slid to and from the backburner as Forum member countries shifted efforts to pitching either for their own relationships with the US or other group access frameworks.
In his 2005 speech though, Lyons had 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 here 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 factor precursors for Free Trade Agreements or FTAs. One U.S expert told me last year that the U.S will not negotiate an FTA with a country with which we do not already have a TIFA. He also said that the 1993 JCC agreement is 90% of the way to a 21st century TIFA,” Lyons had said. “Now I am not saying that the U.S will jump from the JCC to an FTA – we won’t. What I am saying is that a near-TIFA is a very good thing, one not to be ignored.”
Despite the as-yet non-alignment of PICs to the JCC and what it has to offer, past efforts to use it to facilitate trade and investment have resulted in the establishment of a JCC secretariat based at the East-West Centre in Hawaii, the yearly meetings of PICs leaders and US government officials in an event called the Pacific Island Conference of Leaders and a promising document after this annual event in May 2005. Titled: “Draft Proposal on ways to reinvigorate the U.S/Pacific Island Nations Joint Commercial Commission”, this attachment to that meeting’s summary record reaffirmed the U.S stand that the JCC MOU would be the best platform “for any future approach to Washington, DC regarding market access and closer economic relationships at the regional level.”
“In addition, for positive momentum to be re-established by the JCC, whatever activities are undertaken should be concrete (i.e., practical and clear), achievable (i.e., limited in scale), and mutually beneficial to the PINS (Pacific Island Nations) and the U.S. We all understand that the real challenge to trade and investment agreements of all kinds, irrespective of good intentions, boils down to this question: ‘is it translatable into sustained doable action at the national political and economic levels?”
It was further recommended that PICs consider “an incremental, doable, and more focused approach to Washington, DC, using the trade and investment promotion mandate of the JCC as the primary vehicle for developing mutually beneficial economic and specific commercial projects under the JCC arrangement.”
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 the JCC Secretariat and as a result, PIFS was unofficially tasked with the role of getting the island 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.
“Island countries have been less enthusiastic in coming up with a list of products,” said Urwin. “As you can see today (at launch of the 2007 UNESCAP report in Fiji) it is up 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 which new products and services may emerge and which could then be marketed to the US.
He said another issue that PIFS will be talking to US about at the 2007 PICL is the possibility of having Forum member countries gain access, as a collective body, to the US Millennium Challenge Account, an account set up by the US in 2002 to help developing countries but on conditions that they “root out corruption, respect human rights, and adhere to the rule of law, among other things.”


NOTE: This article was published in the Islands Business Magazine (www.islandsbusiness.com) as article titled: MILLENNIUM ACCOUNT TO FEATURE IN US/PACIFIC MEET, p.35, May 2007 edition.