The CARICOM Waste of Time

In the past week we saw a most significant waste of time at the level of Heads of Government in the region.  The term waste of time is being used literally.  CARICOM leaders who met in Montego Bay wasted another opportunity and another crisis - the global economic crisis.

 The fact is when one of the national newspapers headlined Prime Minister Golding’s speech “Time For Action”; it was going back 18 years to the name of the report by a commission of erudite regional scholars led by Sir Shridath Ramphal, who produced a final report on regional integration, with that title.

 The report came three years after the watershed meeting in Grand Anse, Grenada where leaders made a stirring commitment to move the region forward in the face of the movement of countries in the world towards forming trading blocks, which would further marginalise the Caribbean, if they remained these miniscule protected trading markets.

 Since then, institutions like the Single Market and Economy - with Free Movement of Skills, the Regional Stock Exchange, the Caribbean Investment Fund, the Regional Negotiating Machinery and others have been formed and several have be slow into action or floundered.

 In 2010 in Montego Bay, the leaders were faced with heightened imperatives of meeting the challenges of globalisation as a grouping of 15-million citizens or continuing as 15 territories each representing from 5,000 people to 9-million, all with weakening economies.  They were faced with mounting pressure in the region on economies hit by the global economic downturn spawned from the US mortgage crisis.  They also met at a time when the poorest nation in the Community is in crisis after being hit by a massive earthquake which killed more people than make up the population of three or four small CARICOM member states combined.

 And, what has come from the Summit?  Concerns over leadership; worries over why almost a half of the leaders did not attend the meeting and why almost a half of who came had to leave early.

 The Caribbean has very little time to put its house in order to stay afloat in this hostile environment.

 To that extent the lack of action when the Chairman said it was Time for Action, tells us that they wasted this prospect, this moment in history, this opportunity – they wasted this ‘time’.