CARICOM leaders and delegates will have discussions on issues that affect the Caribbean at the upcoming Fifth Assembly Of Caribbean People to be held from August 3 to 8. David Comissiong, president of the Clement Payne Movement and member of the Barbados Organising Committee, made this announcement at a Press conference at the Clement Payne Centre last Tuesday. “We have invited political leadership within CARICOM, as well as Opposition leaders, not in their official capacity but as ordinary citizens of the Caribbean, to sit down together, rub shoulders with the grass roots activists and reason together,” Comissiong said. The Assembly, to be hosted by Barbados at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies, will be a coming together of civil society and representatives of the commonwealth, to discuss the issues facing the Caribbean to develop solutions and initiatives for working together to implement the solutions. Additionally, it is hoped that pan-Caribbean teams will be put together to work after the Assembly to implement the solutions.
Noting that the previous conferences did not have the expected outcomes, Comissiong said the presentations this year would be practical and lend to participatory discourse rather than being academic papers short on concrete solutions and mechanisms for follow-up action. “In the past it has been more of an academic exercise, [but there will be] no long speeches, but interactive discussions and practical solutions.” Some key areas to be discussed are the international financial, economic and debt crisis; the persistent failure to harness the resources of the Caribbean for our own collective industrialisation and development; our lack of food security and the manifestly unsustainable food import burden that the region is bearing; and the need to bring together resources to develop new industries and structures of production.
There will also be caucuses of what are perhaps the three most important segments of the population of the Caribbean, the women, youth and farmers. The Regional Executive Committee determined that the unique ideas and perspectives of these three critical, but often marginalised, segments should be given pre-eminence in the several deeply considered solutions that will emerge from the Assembly.There will be participants from over 12 Caribbean countries. Barbados will be represented by the Clement Payne Movement. (LK)
