OKAY, I’ve beaten this drum BEFORE, but it’s important.
The politicians have taken regional integration as far as they can by providing the legal framework.
It’s now time for visionary Caribbean entrepreneurs to move the process forward by partnering. Indeed, the regional business community, coupled with the Caribbean diaspora, has the potential to propel us into a whole new era of integration and prosperity that would leave behind the petty insularities that have plagued us throughout our history.
Why private capital? Four reasons.
First, the Caribbean private sector has matured in the past 50 years from its roots in conservative merchant capital with limited vision. It’s now more diversified, more competitive and can boast of path-breaking entrepreneurs in several fields.
The digital electronic revolution of the past two decades has intensified this innovative trend. Today’s new Caribbean entrepreneur increasingly thinks beyond the traditional Caribbean ways of making money and, more importantly, thinks beyond national boundaries.
Second, if Caribbean investors can create regional partnerships, the synergies and financial clout realized would allow them to undertake massive projects. This does not preclude them from partnering with foreign capital where necessary and useful. As a region we have to be open to new technologies and skills.
Third, a competitive expansion of Caribbean capital into extra-regional markets is best facilitated on a pan-Caribbean basis.
Fourth, and from the point of view of CARICOM the most important, if Caribbean capital acts jointly in creating regional enterprises, it can avoid the insular stigma that inevitably attaches itself to national enterprises operating in other CARICOM countries and attracting negative political and popular criticism. More positively, it can actually forge new links of unity.
So here are some projects that might lend themselves to joint regional business ventures.
• An airline. Yes. It may still not be too late to get other Caribbean investment to put REDjet back on a solid business footing. Had the airline sought Jamaican and Trinidadian investment in the first place, it would have avoided a lot of the political headwinds it ran into.
• A sea ferry between the countries of the Eastern Caribbean. It would be sheer folly to have an exclusively Trinidadian, Barbadian or St Lucian enterprise operating a ferry service. This would lead to similar complications as occurred with REDjet.
A joint enterprise would more easily facilitate the cooperation of the immigration, customs and other authorities, which is absolutely essential for a ferry service offering a step-on/step-off and drive-on/drive-off service. This ferry could be one of the most far-reaching initiatives in regional integration with all kinds of spin-offs and multiplier effects.
• Participation in the Caribbean cruise industry. The Caribbean is the dominant destination for the international cruise industry with some 60 per cent of its profits coming from Caribbean operations. It’s high time that Caribbean capital (with foreign help) carves out a niche in this industry. Here’s where regional governments could put some political muscle behind
a genuine pan-Caribbean enterprise.
• A chain of state-of-the-art luxury casinos, starting with one on the West Coast of Barbados, located ideally on or near a golf course, with access restricted to those visitors or Barbadians staying in designated upmarket hotels and villas, golf club members and first-class passengers on visiting cruise ships (we want to fleece the rich, not the poor).
Moreover, it should operate within a strict regulatory framework based on international “best practices” that would sharply distinguish it from other less well regulated operations elsewhere. Again, there could be foreign participation.
• Another tourism project that is just begging for pan-Caribbean investment is the creation of an environmentally sensitive eco-hotel complex with an international airstrip at Kaiteur Falls in Guyana. This, too, could be part of a Caribbean chain.
• Finally, a winter cricket Caribbean Premier League, modelled on the Indian Premier League.
All pan-Caribbean projects should offer public shareholding.
The role of regional governments should be to facilitate these projects, including removing all bureaucratic impediments to their success, while regulating in the public interest.
