Together WI swims, divided it sinks -Imperative to find a structure for regional governance in the Caribbean
By:Andy Johnson
Source: Trinidad Express
Sunday, December 9th 2007
GIVEN the length of time already spent on the consideration of regional governance in the caribbean, it is recommended that a decision on the subject be adopted with a sense of urgency. This is how a report prepared by a group called the Technical Working Group, dealing with the issue of Regional Governance in the Caribbean Community was concluded.
It was the first sentence in the final paragraph of the report dated October, 2006. It articulated the position further, to state that this sense of urgency was "especially so in the context of achieving the objectives envisaged in the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas which remain central to the survival and prosperity of the region."
With Caricom leaders hurriedly meeting in the Guyanese capital, Georgetown this weekend against the urgency of the suffocating spirals in the cost of living of people from the Bahamas to Suriname, this issue of speeded up forms of governance comes back centre stage again.
Even as the region's leaders keep being propelled from one apparent or real crisis to the other, the question of what the Technical Working Group calls "Managing Mature Regionalism" keeps being deferred again and again.
"Options for Governance", is what this imperative got referred to as, after it was determined not to refer to it by any nomenclature that would, once again, raise the fears of governments and peoples in countries such as The Bahamas and Jamaica over anything that closely resembles "federation". When the matter came up again some five years ago at an intersessional meeting of Caricom heads in Port of Spain, it came out as "closer political union".
Following a flurry of meetings in the months immediately afterwards, the process was put in the hands of this Technical Working Group, with the Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, holding lead responsibility for it. Former prime minister of St Lucia, Dr Vaughan Lewis, is chairman of the TWG. He has been for the last five years, a senior fellow at the Institute of International Affairs at the UWI, St Augustine.
"History and geography pre-dispose our nation states to combine," Dr Gonsalves told the Caricom summit in St Kitts in July 2006, three months before the completion of the report of the TWG. The leaders, he said, were "called to be apostles of a deeper, more perfect Caribbean union." There were harsh and compelling contemporary realities, he said, which were resident in the region's social economy, and their "unequal and constricting yoke to the international political economy, produce circumstances which induce us to a deeper, more profound integration."
The Georgetown summit, over a single day, was rushed on the basis of an alarm raised by the Prime Minister of Grenada, Carriacou and Petit Martinique, Dr Keith Mitchell, over the impact of the rising cost of living of the region's peoples.
It came virtual days after a declaration by the Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago who, taking another oath of office two days after the last elections, said this devil called the cost of living was going to be a priority item for his new administration. It is also looks like being the primary issue number one in next year's Barbados elections.
And when they met in Georgetown two days ago, it would have been the second time the leaders would have got together on a matter of critical regional importance, since the regular annual summit in July. They would have met also for one day in Port of Spain in early September for the health summit following a damning report produced by another team of regional experts. It concerned an epidemic in non-communicable diseases, such as stroke and heart disease, diabetes, obesity and hypertension.
They are scheduled to meet again in the regular inter-sessional, in February or early March. Quite apart from, but essential to the urgent action required in addressing the health epidemic across the region is what the Commission on Health and Human Development said was the need for conclusion of the years of discussion on implementing a regional Health Insurance Scheme.
This has significant implications as part of the social infrastructure which must be put in place to supplement effective working of the Caricom Single Market and Economy, which itself has freedom of movement for workers and their families as its cornerstone. Arrangements for the E in the CSME to be put into effect, were scheduled to be completed sometime in the coming year.
No likelihood existed last week that there was going to be any discussion on this in Georgetown, or on an update from the September health summit, or even on the structural imperatives recommended by the TWG on the umbrella issue of "Managing Mature Regionalism".
As part of its conclusion, now under consideration for almost 14 months, the TWG report said that "the Caribbean stands at a critical juncture in its evolution which compels it to adopt a creative, yet pragmatic, system of regional governance." Such a system, it said, "must be capable of supporting the wide-ranging process of economic integration as envisaged in the CSME. At the same time, it must respond to global challenges impinging on prospects for national and regional development
"The decisions taken today in respect of the structure of governance therefore assume critical importance in determining the capacity of the region to deal with the plethora of multi-faceted challenges it will continue to face."
Such challenges indeed can be found in the means by which the region has been seeking to address the impact of regional economies of the so-named "Economic Partnership Agreements" governing international trade in the aftermath of the Lome Conventions, and the Cotonou Agreement and the Doha Round, which were both temporary replacements.
