The Council of Ministers of CARIFORUM issues statement on the Ex-post evaluation of the EPA between the EU and its Member States and the CARIFORUM Member States

The European Commission launched a consultancy to conduct an Ex-Post Evaluation of the of the CARIFORUM-EU Economic Partnership Agreement to determine, the extent to which the EPA has been implemented, the bottlenecks and the extent to which the objectives of the Agreement were achieved. The the consultancy, entitled “Ex-post evaluation of the EPA between the EU and its Member States and the CARIFORUM Member States”, was undertaken by ECORYS Netherlands.

CARIFORUM Senior Officials, expressed grave concerns with each iteration of the Report reviewed and submitted written comments to the European Commission detailing the concerns and called for rectification prior to finalization of the Report. Whilst some of the issues were addressed, the Report was finalized and published without crucial matters being addressed. The areas were sufficiently grave to warrant the matter receiving political attention. In this regard, the Council of Ministers of CARIFORUM resolved to use the opportunity of the comprehensive review of the CARIFORUM-EU EPA by the two Sides to have the matters addressed. Whilst accepting that there are some implementation lags, on both Sides, the Council of Ministers anticipated that the review would allow for the grave errors regarding the status of implementation of the Agreement by CARIFORUM to be corrected.

Unfortunately, the review which was expected to take place in December this year, is being further postponed. However, as the Report however remains in the public domain, and given the deleterious effects of its contents for CARIFORUM, the Council of Ministers of CARIFORUM has decided to make public at this time, the Region’s disapproval of and disappointment with the Report and has issued the attached statement.