Editorial | Breaking the logjam

At their summit in Barbados last week Caribbean Community (CARICOM) teased the possibility of some countries, by June, being able to accept, with full rights of residence, other members’ citizens.

That, however, will depend on all members signing, and ratifying, an amendment to the CARICOM treaty, allowing for the multi-track implementation of agreements – that is, allowing those who are ready to proceed, once they account for at least a third of the members, and there is no objection from the rest.

CARICOM has dubbed this arrangement, which was agreed at a summit in Belize two years ago, as a mechanism for “enhanced cooperation”.

“If the protocol is for enhanced cooperation is completely ratified by the end of March, it opens the way for a number of countries to be able to admit the possibility of the freedom of movement for CARICOM nationals from the 1st of June, with the accordant rights of primary and secondary education, emergency healthcare and access to primary healthcare …,” Mia Mottley, the Barbadian prime minister and CARICOM’s chairman, told journalists last week.

Given the potentially critical importance of these measures for advancing CARICOM’s plan to transform itself into a genuine single market and economy, this newspaper hopes that Ms Mottley’s timeline holds.

IMPLEMENTATION DEFICIT

However, given the organisation’s history of failing to meet its goals within the time it says it will – its notorious implementation deficit – we wouldn’t advise anyone to hold their breath.

Indeed, it is this consistent inability to meet agreed commitments and treaty obligations that caused CARICOM’s heads of government, at that 2022 meeting in Belmopan, to accept the work-around, proposed a year earlier by the Avinash Persaud Commission, for “enhanced cooperation” as a way to break the implementation logjam and move the single market project forward.

As the Persaud Commission noted, there are some things that CARICOM will need to do “collectively at the same time”, but also others that could be gotten on with, even if all members are not onboard at the start.

Added the commission: “There are initiatives, for instance, that some would join, but only if others, more enthusiastically, have shown that it works first. Matters that would be done under enhanced cooperation would still be discussed and debated at CARICOM and marshalled by the CARICOM secretariat so that all are involved, just not all starting at the same time.”

At the time of the Belize summit, towards the tail-end of the COVID-19 pandemic that undermined regional economies, we perceived a sense of urgency by CARICOM’s leaders to implement the multi-track functioning of the community. But for reasons that are unexplained, and for this newspaper inexplicable, given that that idea imposes costs or obligations on no member, the project appeared to run out of steam.

As is mostly the case with CARICOM, there are few publicly available documents by the community’s secretariat, or statements by member states, to indicate why, at this stage, Ms Mottley last week appeared uncertain about full ratification of the amended treaty within the given timeline.

LIMITED TRANSPARENCY

It is another example of CARICOM’s limited transparency and of its failure as an institution to sufficiently take its publics, Caribbean citizens, into its confidence. The upshot: a leader-centric movement from which the people whose interests it was established to serve feel alienated.

The scheme, the free movement of people, which Ms Mottley suggested the dual-track arrangement would most immediately facilitate, is among the most enduring example of the community’s implementation deficit. It underlines the logic of “enhanced cooperation”.

Indeed, the free movement of capital and labour are crucial factors in any single economy project. CARICOM has made substantial headway on the latter; it has, at best, meandered on the former.

The community supposedly allows free movement for a handful of categories of workers under cumbersome, nationally run mechanisms.

At CARICOM’s 50th anniversary summit in 2023, the leaders declared that full free movement of the community’s citizens would be allowed by March 2024, once a few legal issues were ironed out.

However, months later, Antigua and Barbuda announced its intention to opt-out of the scheme, saying it couldn’t bear the economic burdens an inflow of CARICOM citizens would impose on its social infrastructure. Other undeclared members might have sought similar derogations, although the Organisation of East Caribbean States (OECS) – whose members are also members of CARICOM – has a free movement regime, which doesn’t appear to have stressed that community.

Ms Mottley pointed to a compelling case for the acceleration of free movement, which Jamaica, with its demographic shifts of recent years, can identify. That is, a population that is falling as it becomes greyer.

With the exception of Haiti, Ms Mottley noted, CARICOM’s population is “declining and ageing”.

“It is imperative,” she said, “that we move to the point where those of us who believe that we are ready for it can open up to ensure that … (freedom of movement) can become a reality.”

This newspaper agrees.