Editorial | CARICOM’s cup half-full

Yesterday the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) formally marked its 50th anniversary as a regional economic integration movement.

This newspaper prefers to view the community as heading towards its 58th anniversary in December, relying on the date of the signing in 1965 of the Dickenson Bay Agreement among Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, that established the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA), the forerunner to CARICOM. That indeed makes CARICOM, as its Secretary General Carla Barnett put it earlier this year, “the longest existing economic integration movement among developing countries”. CARIFTA was launched 17 months before the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

But whatever time frame is applied to CARICOM, using as its start date the Dickenson Bay or the Treaty of Chaguaramas, the prevailing perception among citizens of its 15 member states is of CARICOM as a failure.

The reality is far more nuanced. CARICOM’s major failure is its lack of an economic breakthrough and the consistent inability of its leaders, at the national level, to follow through on agreements to enhance the community’s ability to achieve that breakthrough. It is what even the leaders themselves recognise – which Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the Grenadines often acknowledges as their “implementation deficit”.

So, 34 years after the signing of the Grand Anse Declaration, setting the process in motion, and 17 years after its launch, transitioning CARICOM to a single market and economy remains a work in (slow) progress. Nonetheless, this newspaper believes that the process should be persisted with. The potential value of CARICOM – more so in this increasingly hostile global environment – is greater than the sum of its individual parts.

FUNCTIONAL COOPERATION

Disappointments notwithstanding, there are areas of CARICOM, especially in what its technocrats call functional cooperation, that work well and the community has had significant achievements. The region’s cooperation against the COVID-19 pandemic and member states’ coordination in times of natural disaster are cases in point. And despite the oft-declared obstacles, intra-regional business activity has significantly advanced in recent decades, as has the integration of citizens.

Up to the 1990s, citizens of, say, the Leeward Islands would not likely have directly known or been in regular contact with Jamaicans, unless they met outside the Caribbean. It is now claimed that nearly 10 per cent of the residents of Antigua and Barbuda are Jamaicans. Moreover, after years of deferring its obligation on the free movement of CARICOM citizens, Antigua and Barbuda had the unusual situation in its January elections of its two major political parties promising to outdo the other in fulfilling those responsibilities.

Increasingly, too, Jamaican firms operate in the Eastern Caribbean and vice versa, utilising, though not always without difficulty, their right of establishment.

But perhaps the greatest proof of concept for CARICOM is the Organisation of East Caribbean States (OECS), whose seven full members are also members of the community. They have accelerated their own integration, including a key element of a single market – the free movement of labour. They also share a central bank and a common currency.

The pressures of domestic politics and presumed capacity weaknesses often underpin the reluctance of some members, especially some in the Eastern Caribbean (dubbed lesser developed on the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas), of wider embrace of an OECS-style leap into integration. But in the short term, CARICOM has mechanisms to help leverage itself out of the deeper parts of its single-market quagmire.

AGREED POSITIONS

Last year, its leaders agreed to allow like-minded members to implement agreed positions on which others are tentative, once a minimum threshold for participation is met and most other partners do not object. That arrangement should be fast-tracked. Perhaps, too, the OECS model of subsidiarity might be explored by CARICOM members in the North and Southern Caribbean.

More critically, CARICOM needs internal mission leaders/drivers – on the one side political and intellectual, and on the other economic. France and Germany played that role for the European Union.

This newspaper had previously argued that those jobs naturally belonged to Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, as the community’s political and economic leaders, respectively. Neither, especially in recent years, responded with sustained energy or sense of mission. Some of their reasons were complex, including geopolitical.

However, a new window of opportunity has opened. The region’s political and intellectual leadership has shifted decidedly to Barbados and its prime minister, Mia Mottley, a dedicated regionalist who also appreciates CARICOM’s potential in helping to drive the agenda of the Global South. Ms Mottley’s advocacy for transforming the global financial and the toehold gained by her Bridgetown Initiative for financing the climate change adaptation and other development needs of developing countries is an example.

It is still early days, but the signs are that economic leadership is transitioning to Guyana with the development of its oil industry and access to a plethora of other resources. But more importantly, this newspaper senses that President Mohamed Irfaan Ali grasps, and shares, the concept of shared regional development.

If we are right, CARICOM might just reboot itself.