Behind
the Manning-Chavez energy freeze
PORT SPAIN
Petroleumworldtt.com
02 24 08
WHO says the Venezuelan Government is against
Trinidad and Tobago's bid to house the headquarters
of the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas? Not
Caracas, not the high level officials at the Venezuelan
Embassy in Port of Spain.
Not, certainly, the mercurial Hugo Chavez, Venezuela's
populist President, the proponent of the alternative
Alba, a scheme to rival the FTAA.
Files at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Port
of Spain on current relations between both countries
contain a letter of support, from the Venezuelan
Government, on this country's FTAA headquarters
bid. That Venezuela has objections to it, and that
it has proposed an alternative are seen as absolutely
not dissonant with that letter of support.
Should Mexico, Brazil and Chile, among those Latin
American countries other than Venezuela who harbour
massive concerns about the technical details concerning
the operations of the FTAA could get over those
fears, the arrangement could yet fly.
And Venezuela will not hesitate to give life to
its commitment to support this country as headquarters
host. So that, when the Prime Minister of Trinidad
and Tobago continues to tell reporters that Venezuela's
opposition to the FTAA is what lies behind this
country's refusal to support PetroCaribe, and that
PetroCaribe itself is a contentious alternative
to this country's energy facility to other Caricom
member states, he is mixing apples with oranges,
Venezuela responds.
These and other notes were offered as matters
of clarification last month, against the clearest
indication yet, that relations between Port of
Spain and Caracas have been strained, over the
issue of energy and energy diplomacy.
Following a meeting in Cuba last December, on
going forward with PetroCaribe, Venezuela's offer
of an energy facility to Caricom member states,
Trinidad and Tobago's position regarding this scheme
was questioned. Baldwin Spencer, Prime Minister
of Antigua, the last to sign on to PetroCaribe,
said to larger support from others present, the
arrangement ought not to proceed without a firm
indication as to where Trinidad and Tobago stood
on the issue.
This was December 2007. In July 2006, however,
days after several Caricom member states had initialled
their support for the offer at a meeting in the
Venezuelan port city of Puerto La Cruz, the Prime
Minister of Trinidad and Tobago expressed his peeve
at the Caricom summit in Castries, St Lucia. It
was seen as an undercutting of this country's facility,
and its position relative to its role as a leader
in the sub-hemispheric regional integration movement.
By the end of the four-day summit, however, Prime
Minister Manning had accepted a mandate that he
be the one to negotiate with Venezuela the terms
on which PetroCaribe would be operationalised,
on behalf of those members who signed on to it.
Barbados was the only other Caricom member state
which had and expressed no interest in it.
In a deep background briefing session at the Venezuelan
embassy in Port of Spain late last month, however, embassy
officials said there had been no further developments
on that decision. No direct talks had taken place
in the 18 months since. This is in spite of the
fact that most of the Caricom member states who
went for it, have been receiving supplies of Venezuelan
energy products in accordance with the offer.
At the outset, the Venezuelans
say, both Dominica and Antigua had "other ideas" abut
how they wanted to use the facility that were
not consistent
with the terms of the agreement. But these differences
were worked through, they say.
PetroCaribe provides
for crude oil equivalent of 100,000 barrels a day.
This is below 10 per cent of Venezuela's domestic
needs. Most of the Caricom member states which
have moved to access it use between 7,000 and 10,000
barrels a day. It is described as the continuation
of Venezuela's long-standing arrangements for assistance
to countries in the western hemisphere, and not
as any direct intervention into the region's geopolitics,
undercutting this country's leadership role, as
it has been interpreted in some quarters.
At the Cuba meeting in December,
Chavez called on Trinidad and Tobago to "join PetroCaribe." At
the opening of the new Hyatt Regency hotel in Port
of Spain in early January, Manning was asked to
respond, in light of an editorial in the Express
which called on him to clear the air on the issue.
He said, inter alia, that the bilateral
arrangements between the two countries on energy
was "on
hold." He said the Venezuelan Foreign Minister
had opposed proposals for the joint exploitation
of gas reserves straddling the seas between both
countries. He said Chavez was supposed to have
come to Port of Spain in May last year to sign
an agreement on joint unitisation but he didn't.
The ball, he said, was in Chavez's court, instead
of his.
The Prime Minister went further
still. He said PetroCaribe was "part of a more comprehensive
set of prescriptions" which Chavez was advancing,
in competition with "the established Western
Hemisphere system." He was referring to the
ALBA, the so-called Bolivarian economic alternative
for Latin America which he said was rivalling the
FTAA. Trinidad and Tobago, Manning repeated, had
been convincing its Caricom partners to support
its bid for the FTAA headquarters to be sited in
Port of Spain.
"How in the face of that could we go and
sign into an agreement which scuttles the FTAA
and introduces a new alternative without any consensus
within the Caribbean," he asked.
The Venezuelan embassy officials
were aghast at that. They went back to the initialling
of the
joint unitisation framework agreement in Venezuela
in April. They said it had taken four years and
14 meetings of talks to get to that point. A comprehensive
agreement coming out of that "framework",
they said was likely going to take a similar effort,
over a similar length of time. It was, they repeated
for effect, "an agreement to agree. Details,
operations procedures and protocols now had to
be settled. Teams had to be established on both
sides. There was no way Chavez could have come
to sign anything the following month. One official,
in intimate in the process to that point, said
he was aware Port of Spain had sent a proposal
to Caracas. He said it "somehow got lost," to
be retrieved moths later, in July. Up to last month,
he said though, it had not been replied to.
But more than that, the diplomats said, PetroCaribe
has nothing to do with FTAA, which has nothing
to do with ALBA. Also, they said, if Mercosur could
co-exist with the Andean Pact and with the Rio
Group, it could also co-exist with FTAA. They insist
that if FTAA were to be a reality, they are on
record as pledging support to Trinidad and Tobago's
headquarters bid. That commitment they say, is
on record, in Port of Spain.
Reference to the Rio Group refreshed
the issue of the meeting in Margarita in April
of the South
American energy conference when Manning was uninvited.
Going "deeply off the record", one official
explained it was one of the other member countries
which had raised objections over the invitation
issued to Manning, by the Venezuelan Foreign Minister.
It was felt that Trinidad and Tobago
was not a member of the group, and it was a "members
only" meeting. Caracas was put in the unenviable
position of having to cancel its invitation. Being
both countries on the South American mainland,
Caricom member-states Guyana and Suriname are both
members of this grouping, and did attend the Margarita
confab. The Venezuelans reported that it was Manning
who had insisted to Chavez that the meeting ought
not to have taken place without the participation
of Trinidad and Tobago, to which Chavez readily
agreed.
Both the Chavez no show in Port of Spain to which
Manning referred and his own uninvitation to the
Margarita meeting happened within weeks of each
other last April. The energy momentum and indeed
diplomacy of almost any sort, have stood still
across the channel since then.
Now just three months on the job,
Foreign Minister Paula Gopee-Scoon said at Christmas
all her energies
were being focussed on "energy."
Story
by Senior CCN Writer Andy Johnson for
Trinidad Express
Trinidad
Express
Wednesday, February 20th 2008
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