Editorial | CARICOM-Africa summit – When kith and kin talk

Tomorrow’s summit between the leaders of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and African nations provides an opportunity for them to recast the debate on global governance, away from the narrow confines within which it has been set by the big global powers. Hopefully, they will grasp it – as kith and kin.

But a meaningful effort, especially for the Caribbean, will require global policy activism of a kind that the region has not engaged in for over four decades, since the 1970s. It will demand speaking frankly, at times discomfitingly, with some of the region’s better friends, including the United States. Leaders quiescently huddling outside office doors of the new Mar-a-Lago won’t cut it.

The summit is taking place against the backdrop of interwoven and complex developments, the most obvious, and immediately compelling, of which is the COVID-19 pandemic. The coronavirus highlights the economic divide, and other inequities, between rich and poor countries, which includes most of those in the Caribbean and Africa.

Last year the pandemic slashed global output by over four per cent. In the tourism-dependent Caribbean, however, the region’s gross domestic product (GDP) declined by more than 12 per cent. In Africa, GDP fell just over two per cent, although the decline was a little less in the sub-Saharan region. This year, the Caribbean and Africa are projected to grow by 3.8 and 3.4 per cent, respectively, but in both cases per capita GDP, at best, won’t return to pre-crisis levels until after 2022; and in some countries not until 2025. Unlike rich nations, which are able to borrow cheaply, Africa and the Caribbean cannot afford to pump trillions of dollars into their economies to spur recovery and drive growth, as well as to provide relief to their hardest-hit citizens.

VACCINE DISPARITY

The disparities, however, are most evident in the distribution of COVID-19 vaccines. Nearly 53 per cent of America’s population is already fully vaccinated. In Britain it is nearly 55 per cent. Less than two per cent of Africa’s 1.2 billion people are fully vaccinated. The continent, like the Caribbean, has limited access to the drug, the market for which was cornered by rich countries even before the products were developed. Low vaccination rates undermine prospects for robust economic recovery.

Vaccine access, therefore, must be high on the agenda of the leaders. So, too, must be the structures that underpin these disparities, as well as what is to be done to rejuvenate a multilateralist order. One in which the interests of developing countries are protected. In this regard, it won’t be enough to celebrate the passage of Donald Trump’s presidency and assume full withering of all that he stood for, or a reset of all of America’s initiatives.

While Mr Biden, for instance, supported proposals that the World Trade Organization (WTO) waive intellectual property protections for vaccines to ramp up global production, his administration, noticeably, has not brought much energy to that fight in the face of pushback by the pharmaceutical industry and other interests.

Neither has Mr Biden’s mantra that “America is back” to multilateralism meant fundamental shifts in policies, but for the US’ easier relationship with its NATO allies. Mr Biden’s foreign policy statements are not delivered with Mr Trump’s narcissistic bellicosity. At the WTO, the United States remains focused on reforming the body’s appeals mechanism, which it claims works against America. Its other pushes are aimed primarily at giving US interests greater leverage in global trade.

Further, Mr Biden is, if anything, more deeply focused than Mr Trump on containing China’s emergence as a global economic and military power. America’s messy retreat from Afghanistan, and the need he may feel to counteract internal political arguments of a weakened America, will perhaps lead a doubling down on his China/Russia strategies, as well as America’s pivot to Asia, especially that region’s east and southeast quadrant.

LACK URGENCY

Against that backdrop, the fact that Caribbean countries are mostly classified as middle-income, disqualifying these highly indebted countries from certain financial support, will lack urgency for the Biden administration. America’s push for China to be stripped of classifications that gives it trade advantages also pushes lower down on the agenda, the failure of the Doha Round of trade negotiations and its promise to pursue the interests of developing countries. Additionally, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s drumbeat for an overhaul of the Bretton Woods institutions, to make them more responsive to the needs of developing counties, is not the rhythm to which Mr Biden and other G7 leaders will readily march to.

This summit, therefore, requires that the leaders of Africa and the Caribbean not only recognise their common concerns, but begin to frame joint responses to looming global challenges. They must demand more than token places in the negotiating fora. And they must take to the table clear ideas and concrete proposals for reform. The summit should also be a stepping stone from which the two groups, via other common institutions – such as the Commonwealth and the Association of African, Caribbean and Pacific States – the Caribbean and Africa rally a wider cohort with common interests, to pursue a credible global reform agenda.

More than four decades ago, the then leaders of many of the countries at the table this week had a vision for greater South-South cooperation – economic and other partnerships between developing countries to break the stranglehold of the power of rich nations. They made little headway. The idea, nonetheless, remains relevant. It should be seriously revived this week.