IN THIS first Weekend Nation column for 2011, I regret having to hope, as a journalist in our Caribbean Community (CARICOM), that when the heads of government gather next month in Grenada for a scheduled Inter-Sessional Meeting they would make a very serious effort to check the growing cynicism over the realisation of a CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME).
The realisation would require not more of customary official platitudes about “One Community, One Market, One People”. Rather, there needs to be intellectual honesty and moral obligation to arrest the tendency, in more than a few governments, from treating intra-regional migration as a plague to be avoided. Even amid the ongoing migration of skilled nationals to North America and Europe.
Rather than national immigration and customs services being restructured and reoriented to competently serve an envisaged seamless regional economy, new arrangements are being introduced to make life even more difficult for CARICOM nationals, to the point, at times, where they feel unwanted – including those with needed skills.
For all the official rhetoric, the multiplicity of ministerial and officials meetings, before and after the inauguration in 2006 of the single market dimension of the CSME, precious little have been achieved to advance primary policies and programmes to deliver the promised seamless regional economy by 2015.
That goal is clearly being endangered by a political myopia being sustained in too many regional capitals where governments seem to feel that the ideals that led to the inauguration of CARICOM in 1973 and the policies and programmes identified for the realisation of the CSME can be taken for granted.
What progress, for instance, has there been to finalise the body of laws to give a legal profile for implementation of the CSME, if not by the original 2015 target, shortly thereafter?
The Caribbean Congress of Labour and the Caribbean Association of Industry and Commerce are among regional organisations that have repeatedly expressed disappointments and/or reservations about the way forward for the CSME.
At present there is no longer even a functioning tripartite mechanism for scheduled dialogues.
Further, towards the latter part of 2010 there emerged the negative signals from two prime ministers – Jamaica’s Bruce Golding and Trinidad and Tobago’s Kamla Persad-Bissessar – about the likely establishment of their own final national appeal court, in preference to accessing the Caribbean Court of Justice as the last resort.
Of course, while inaction has long laid to rest a short-lived Caribbean Community of Parliamentarians as a non-binding deliberative forum, arrangements to give promised legal status to the CARICOM Charter of Civil Society for enhancing democratic governance and the strengthening of political, economic social and culltural rights, continue to prove elusive.
The official “talk” is normally good. What about the action to give it meaning? A CARICOM Day was unanimously agreed to for annual observance of the inauguration on July 4, 1973, with an official holiday if possible. Its focus should be on inspiring people’s involvement with educational programmes and cultural events. As I recall no more than four of the 15-member countries pay.
