A new year provides an opportunity for a new beginning!
And so, the People’s Empowerment Party (PEP) embraces the year 2012 as an opportunity for the Barbadian and Caribbean people to take a fresh guard in relation to both their individual island nation building projects and to their collective multi-territory Caribbean Community project.
The PEP wishes to draw to the attention of the governments and people of our 15 CARICOM member nations that the year 2012 is the 20th anniversary of the groundbreaking report issued by the West Indian Commission!
It was on the May 25, 1992, that chairman of the West Indian Commission, Sir Shridath Ramphal, and his 14 fellow commissioners, signed the report entitled Time For Action, after an extensive three-year period of consulting with the Caribbean people and working out a comprehensive blueprint for taking the CARICOM countries forward and deepening their unity.
The West Indian Commission was a product of the historic CARICOM Heads of Government Summit that was held in Grenada in July 1989, and that produced the visionary Grand Anse Declaration, which, amongst other things, decreed the establishment of a CARICOM Single Market And Economy (CSME) and gave birth to a West Indian Commission to craft a programme for taking our sub-region forward.
Within three years the Commission delivered to the Heads of Government a Caribbean people’s manifesto for change and action. But, as is so often the case, the CARICOM governments engaged in a minimal implementation of the 500-page report, thereby resulting in a multitude of constructive Caribbean-building proposals lying unused for the past 20 years!
It is incumbent on us, therefore, to use this 20th anniversary year to revisit the Time For Action manifesto to identify those proposals that are still relevant to the challenges that our CARICOM countries face in 2012 and to craft a new developmental initiative based on the native Caribbean wisdom that the Commission’s report represented.
It is clear to us in the PEP that our CARICOM nations need to confront this era of profound recession with a regional development programme based on the following planks:
(1) The development of collectively owned, multi-territory regional industries producing food and basic industrial commodities;
(2) The establishment of a regional monetary authority focused on ensuring exchange and convertibility of national currencies, developing a common regional currency and augmenting the stock of development capital;
(3) The development of a regional transportation network comprising merchant shipping and a regional airline and fast ferry service;
(4) The development of a regional telecommunications, mass media and filmmaking network;
(5) The establishment and promotion of a multi-territory CARICOM tourism project;
(6) The establishment of a regional science, technology, research and development network, and a regional ‘Energy Authority’.
(7) The downsizing, rationalization and sharing of Foreign Affairs departments and diplomatic missions.
This is the type of developmental initiative that the ideas contained in the West Indian Commission report can help us to flesh out and begin implementing during the course of this year!
