By Lynford Simpson, Staff Reporter 
Obasanjo and Jagdeo
A DOUBLE-SWIPE at American policies came from the two visiting Presidents of Guyana and Nigeria yesterday as they addressed a joint sitting of Parliament.
In a direct swipe at the United States, the Guyanese President Bharrat Jagdeo said: "Some exhort us to open our markets, remove subsidies, but they openly subsidise their farmers and remove access to their markets".
The Nigerian President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo lashed out at the United States for wanting democracy on its terms. He criticised the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies which, he said, has been circulating a report which pronounces the forthcoming elections in Nigeria to have already failed to meet international credibility standards.
Earlier the Guyanese President called for the establishment of a Regional Development Fund to help smaller states of the hemisphere find their way in the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which is scheduled to come into being in 2005.
He noted that the international environment was "often unsympathetic to our cause and condition as small emerging states". He said that small economies were unable to attract a fair share of investments and aid flows and were experiencing financial difficulties, because of the large debt burden "and shocks to our revenue owing to the changing international environment".
The result, he said, was "high unemployment and attendant poverty and an increase in anti-social behaviour crime, drugs and senseless violence".
He asserted that "globalisation poses a serious problem to our way of life".
"Some of the advocates of this process are still stuck in the realms of speaking of its potential benefits ...yet the cries of our farmers inform us that the possible benefits have not yet arrived," he said. According to the Guyanese President, "globalisation must be assessed from the point of view of its impact on the people of our countries".
President Jagdeo also called for the creation of a new financial system and for the democratisation of the international financial institutions. This system, he said, would recognise the vulnerability of small states.
He accused developed countries of promoting policies beneficial only to themselves, pointing out that a closer examination of many of their domestic policies revealed a proclivity to unilateralism and self-interest.
"Some countries justly urge us to fight crime and to battle illicit drugs. However, they either do not see or do not care about the connection between these problems and the uncontrolled export of small arms to our region," President Jagdeo said.
He noted that they, "continue to send back thousands of criminal deportees to our countries while they aggressively recruit our trained nurses and teachers".
Most deportees are sent back to the region from the United States, Britain and Canada. Last year, hundreds of teachers, the majority of them Jamaicans, were recruited to teach in classrooms in the United States and Britain.
He said developing countries were being urged to do more to protect the environment, while some developed countries "who are the world's worst polluters are currently withdrawing from many international commitments to safeguard the environment".
He urged CARICOM to be unified in its approach to tackling the problems. Anything less, he stated, would "leave us condemned to remain on the periphery of international development."
President Obasanjo in his address, stressed his country's commitment to democracy. He acknowledged that his country had battled an image problem because of its past brushes with dictatorship and "ghastly civil war."
"I wonder whose standards?" he said, adding that "we vehemently reject, in absolute terms, this sanctimonious view of democracy as political fashion that is designed and fitted only in Western intellectual shops."
Tracing the history of his country from the time of independence from Britain in 1960 and the subsequent struggles of self-government, President Obasanjo said: "Our commitment today to democracy and its values is not at all a theoretical matter. It is not a leisured preference for one constitutional norm against others. It is, on the contrary, a gut reaction to a live and abhorrent experience."
"We uphold today the principles of freedom and individual liberty and we renounce tyranny in all its forms...our commitment to democracy today is not at all an option. It is a fundamental imperative."
The Nigerian President, like his Guyanese counterpart, also highlighted the contradictions of liberalisation.
He pointed to the 1970s when, he said, all aid to Nigeria was suspended by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) on the grounds that the country did not require international financial aid, mainly because of the revenue it was deriving from oil exports.
This, he said, was in large part responsible for the country's $28 billion debt, as it was forced to borrow from the international financial markets.
President Obasanjo left the island yesterday.
