CMC – Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders began a two-day special summit in Trinidad on Monday discussing ways of improving the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) that was intended to deepen the regional integration movement.
The Guyana-based CARICOM Secretariat said that the leaders at their last summit in July “recognised the need to keep focus on the CSME and agreed to have this Special Meeting on that issue”.
The architects of the initiative were of the view that while a primary focus of the common market was on liberalising trade in goods among the member countries, the single market and economy (SME) was intended to expand the process to includes services, free movement of capital, skilled labour and the freedom to establish business enterprises anywhere within the 15-member grouping.
“The meeting is wide open to review all aspects of the CSME,” CARICOM Secretary General Irwin La Rocque told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC), adding “I think we have to wait for the outcome tomorrow”.
The CSME, conceptualised in 1989, and while it has recorded progress, there are general concern about the rate of implementation of some of the decisions taken to push the initiative forward.
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who has lead responsibility for the CSME within the quasi-CARICOM Cabinet, said priority to the start of the meeting, she is hoping that the outcome would prove beneficial to the region.
“To make the Caribbean a more better, a more effective place for our people,” she said. St. Lucia’s Prime Minister Allen Chastanet said he was hoping for “frank discussions” on the CSME given the events unfolding within the global community that could have a bearing on the region.
“It really requires us to make sure that out space is as efficiently run as possible and that we are taking advantage of wherever we have comparative advantage in the world,” he added.
The special-two day summit here follows the summit held in Jamaica in July where Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness, who is chairing the deliberations here had indicated that his leadership of the 15-member grouping would call for member states to take decisive actions to transform the CSME into a facility that will truly serve the interest of Caribbean people.
“We will call upon all member states to summon the necessary political will and determination to ensure that programmes and initiatives are strategically focused and geared towards meeting an ambitious process of reform,” the Prime Minister said.
Prior to the Jamaica summit, the Jamaica Parliament had adopted a resolution that called for a re-evaluation of the integration process, and for member states to commit to implementing a fully functional single market within a five-year period.
The Parliamentary Resolution covered, among other things, the need for CARICOM member states to make a clear commitment to establishing the single market with a “specific time-bound, measurable and verifiable programme of actions to fulfil all outstanding obligations within a period of five years”.
At the Jamaica summit, Mottley, had pointed to “psychological impediments and the closed mind-sets in some quarters of officialdom” as some reasons for the under-achievement of the CSME.
She explained that because the practical implications of decisions sometimes are not worked out beforehand, and the recording of the decisions often are not clear and precise, “these (decisions) fall victim to bureaucratic inertia or resistance from those who did not participate meaningfully in their design or have not been fully enlightened as to their positive purpose”.
Not all the regional leaders are attending the summit here. Guyana’s President David Granger is due to travel to Cuba for medical treatment and Antigua and Barbuda’s Prime Minister Gaston Browne is being represented by a delegation headed by his Foreign Affairs Minister Everly Paul ‘Chet’ Green.
St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minster Dr. Ralph Gonsalves was not present when the meeting began but officials have said like the Haitian President, Jovenel Moise, he is expected here for the two day summit.
Host Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley had made the revitalisation of the CSME one of his regional priorities and had expressed his frustration with the lack of action on the matter saying, “I get the impression that all we are willing to do is talk this issue to death.” “We cannot expect to get the benefits of medication if we refuse to swallow the medication,” he said last year.
CARICOM…like Federation before it will neverbecome a reality except by ‘force’.
Regionality is an insufficient reason to accomplish this. Peoples are strangely different socially and culturally. The shear difference in population size and demographics belies a coming together. Not to mention the disparities in living standards! Politicians and those proposing this are simply looking fir a way out of seruously developing their jurisdictions for their own peoples. FDI is the ONLY answer they see..a policy that has futher enslaved Caribbean peoples while offering crumbs from the table.All that glitters realky isn’t gold and Caribvean peoples had better become MORE involved in Governance before being led down a ‘proverbial’ garden path by short-sited incompetitent leaders!