Whither CSME?

Aug 20, 2008 Editorial

Guyana, as one of the founders of the Caribbean Free Trade Area (Carifta) in the sixties, which segued into CARICOM in the seventies and is supposed to end up as the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) by 2015, has expended an extraordinary amount of resources towards the goal of regional integration.

However, the news coming fast and furiously out of several capitals of our fellow members of CARICOM, should cause our political leaders to sit up and ask whether we are all reading from the same hymn book much less the same page as far as the CSME goes.

From reports carried in our newspaper on Monday, Trinidad and Tobago has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to proceed with a political union with the nine countries that comprise the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). Since the matter evidently needs only a simple majority, which the PNM possesses, it appears that the union is imminent.

According to Prime Minister Patrick Manning of Trinidad and Tobago, his Cabinet will consider the matter this tomorrow and have it ratified by Parliament when it reconvenes.

In our Tuesday’s edition, Prime Minister Stephenson King of St Lucia claimed that the agreement was not “an attempt to undermine CARICOM” but was intended to add another “circle” to the OECS and CARICOM. We are not sure about what exactly that means but it does appear that the members of the incipient union are hedging their bets on the CSME.

The latter body, after all, was intended to offer the free movement of goods, services, people, capital and technology among the members of CARICOM.

Within the unit, new markets would have been opened up, trade and investment promoted, a wider choice of operating locations provided – all leading to improved economies of scale, reduced costs and increased competitiveness for the products of the region.

The new union will not offer the foregoing on the same scale and thus we must look elsewhere for its genesis and energy.

Recently Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the Grenadines, expressed his dissatisfaction with the pace of CARICOM integration to the Jamaica Observer and blamed the “politics of regional engagement in Jamaica, shackled by the ghosts of federal referendum, the politics of ethnicity on Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana; a mistaken sense of uniqueness and separateness among large sections of the Barbados populace; the peculiar distinctiveness of Haiti and Suriname; and the cultivated aloofness from the regional enterprise by the Bahamas.”

While his litany of disincentives towards a successful CSME are noted, Mr Gonsalves still felt it satisfactory to take his country into a political union with T&T and its “politics of ethnicity”. What goes?

With Jamaica leading the charge to sign the EPA with the EU, it would appear that they are about to repeat their torpedoing of the WI Federation (1962) by going it alone. It would appear that T&T, on the other hand, might be seeking to protect its interests to secure wider markets for its products by uniting with the small islands of the OECS that it can dominate.

The protestations of Prime Minister King that the smaller islands do not intend to get “swallowed up” by T&T sounds hopeful but not realistic.

T&T, up to now, had passed up the opportunity to sell its petroleum on easier terms to its CARICOM partners, and has seen Venezuela leapfrog over it with its PetroCaribe Initiative. Maybe it believes that it is its interests to service the smaller islands and not the entire Caricom with petroleum.

But be that as it may, where do all these manoeuverings and realignments leave Guyana? Out in the cold, it appears to us.

We return to an earlier initiative of Trinidad’s that we thought demonstrated a lack of confidence (to say the least) about the goals of the CSME – the establishment of mega farms in T&T to address its food security in the face of Guyana’s earlier offer of land to its partners of Caricom to do the same for the region as a whole.

Even after our Minister of Agriculture directly contacted them, the Trinidadians never responded to our offer. We now understand that they have contacted India to supply farmers for several of the mega farms – even as they turn away Guyanese at Piarco Airport.

As far as the CSME goes, let us wake up and smell the coffee: it’s not Jamaican Blue Mountain.

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