ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the first of the book’s three case studies. It provides a national-level analysis of the negotiation and implementation of the EU-CARIFORUM Economic Partnership Agreement, followed by an industry-level analysis of the agreement’s impacts on workers in the Guyanese sugar industry. It argues that there was insufficient political pressure and institutional capacity to follow through on the labour provisions, partly because they had not been designed to map onto the region in a coherent way. In the Guyanese sugar industry, this has been all the more notable because of the upheavals that followed in the wake of the EPA, where closures of sugar estates in the country’s single biggest employer led to economic dislocation and political discontent. With its focus on niche export opportunities and appeals to social dialogue, the EPA was simply unable to mitigate such trade-induced dynamics on this section of the Guyanese workforce.
