For several years, at the International Whaling Commission (IWC), the six independent countries of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and Suriname have supported Japan's yen for killing endangered species of whales. But, last June the Prime Minister of Dominica, Roosevelt Skerritt, boldly broke ranks and announced in advance of the IWC's 60th meeting that Dominica would abstain on a vote for "the sustainable use of marine resources" which really means "killing whales".

It now seems that his principled position should have been adopted by the other Caribbean countries. The Japanese are working out an unsavoury deal with the outgoing George W Bush administration of the United States that might not only give them what they want, but also shed them of any need for Caribbean support.

Before I proceed any further with this commentary, I should make it clear that I am opposed to the killing of whales. Equally, I am opposed to unilateral rules on taxation and financial services made by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that are imposed on small jurisdictions such as those in the Caribbean. Japan, a leading member of the OECD and the current co-chair of its Global Forum on Taxation, is a hawk on this issue which, since 1998, has severely damaged the offshore financial services of many Caribbean jurisdictions.

Ominous clouds are gathering around financial services in the Caribbean both offshore and onshore. The clouds are approaching from two directions – the new US government that will take office in January 2009, and the European Union (EU) in the implementation of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) that Caribbean countries have signed.

The Caribbean will well recall the blacklisting of many of their jurisdictions in 1998 by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) – known as the rich nations' club – when it launched its so-called 'harmful tax competition initiative' (HTCI). The OECD claimed that the tax-revenue bases of its member states were being eroded by competition from 41 low taxing jurisdictions some of them in the Caribbean.

Alongside the HTCI, the OECD's sister-organisation, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), initiated its "Forty recommendations on money laundering" which it then unilaterally sought to impose on the world by naming countries that it said were "uncooperative" in the effort to curb money laundering. Of course, the so-called recommendations were not recommendations at all; they were rules that the OECD countries alone created. Eventually, the IMF, also controlled by the OECD countries, adopted the "recommendations" and now use them as part of the financial sector appraisal programmes of countries.

The OECD's HTCI initiative was widely seen as an attempt to kill the offshore financial services sector of the economies of developing states which had turned to such services as a means of diversifying their economies and easing their reliance on the exports of primary products or tourism. The financial services providers in some of these countries in the Caribbean, such as the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas and Bermuda, became very good at it and gave stiff competition to their rivals in the OECD nations.

This commentary is being written before the US Presidential election on November 4th. At this point, it seems certain that Barack Obama will be elected President of the United States of America.

In earlier commentaries while I clearly stated my personal wish to see Obama elected, I expressed grave reservations about the capacity of the majority of white Americans to rise above their centuries-old racial prejudice to elect a black man to the White House.

If, as now seems the case, the majority white people of America join with black people to elect Obama, he would have made a big step and America would have made a huge leap.

Obama's election will change not only how America is seen by other peoples of the world, but also how Americans see themselves.

Notwithstanding a decision by the meeting of Heads of Government of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) group in Ghana on October 2nd and 3rd to appoint a troika to "engage in high-level consultations" on the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union (EU), several Caribbean countries will sign a full agreement on 15th October.

The two Caribbean countries that have said they will not are Guyana and Haiti.

In the process, the largest active group of developing countries faces disintegration. It is a sad time for developing countries for they have lost the only strength they had – their unity in negotiating with the larger and more powerful nations of Europe.

At the end of the Ghana meeting, the President of Tanzania, Mizengo Peter Pinda, observed that "it is regrettable and disturbing that while the EU comprising the big economies continue to expand its membership, the negotiations under EPAs are deliberately forcing the ACP groups and Regional Economic Communities to disintegrate". His observation is perfectly correct. But, the ACP has only itself to blame.

While it is true that Caribbean countries were under no compulsion to sign the EPA on 15th October and they could have waited for the consultations of the ACP troika, the split in the ACP did not begin with the Caribbean. It was the former French colonies of Africa that began the process by agreeing to the separation of Africa into four separate negotiating groups. To the Caribbean's credit, its representatives tried to preserve ACP unity. Had the ACP stood-up, the EU would not have succeeded in separating them.