CARICOM, the crisis and help

Jul 22, 2009 Editorial

With Jamaica and Dominica forced to turn to the IMF for funds to help them deal with the effects of the global financial crisis, one would hope that this act would help focus the minds of the leaders of CARICOM on the need for concerted action.
The 30th Heads of Government Conference, held here in Guyana earlier this month, ended rather desultorily with no appreciable progress on the key objectives that they themselves had set to assist the peoples of the region to improve their standard of living.
They did, however; establish a high level Task Force comprising President Jagdeo (the head) and the Prime Ministers of Jamaica, T&T, Barbados and St Vincent. This task force is supposed to come up with a game plan to confront the crisis. Of course, it follows hard on the heels of several discussions by the Bureau of the Heads of Government on the issue – “aided”, we were told, by analyses of the CARICOM Secretariat and the Committee of Central Bank governors – and of two other task forces that were also supposed to propose strategies for the region.
It has been reported that President Jagdeo will be meeting imminently with the members of his Task Force’s technical support team, comprising the CARICOM Secretary-General; President of the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB); Director-General of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS); and the Director of the Caribbean Centre for Money and Finance (CCMF).
President Jagdeo is reported to have observed, “This is an emergency and action must be taken urgently.” For a crisis that has been defined for over a year as “the worst since the great depression of the 1930’s” one wonders why it is only now ‘an emergency”.
Since the same leaders of CARICOM have already blown the opportunity several times this year to move on the issues (governance and CSME) that would make the body more capable of taking decisive actions – whether on the financial crisis or on any other issue – we can only surmise that they would plan to seek assistance from the developed world as they have been prone to do since colonial times.
Take the issue of food: we have been weeping and wailing ad nauseum for decades about the regional foreign food bill – now totalling some US$4 billion – but the Jagdeo Initiative on Agriculture that could have solved the problem (and the need to find those billions of hard currency) has been forced to wither on the vine.
President Jagdeo – as leader of a country that is one of the oldest clients of the IMF – is eminently qualified to advise the other CARICOM leaders on their modus operandi. Not that these countries do not also have some experience with the IMF, but from their recent proud pronouncements about “international mendicants” they appeared to have repressed the memories.
We hope that the conditionalities of the IMF make the new “mendicants” appreciate the benefits of a closer union within CARICOM.
Outside of the International Financial Institutions, there are, of course, the “rich” G8 countries. The communiqué of the last G8 meeting in Italy earlier this year, however, should dispel any optimism that significant aid will flow from this quarter.
Their US$20 trillion of support for corporate bailouts in the past year is more than the total spending on poverty eradication in the last 50 years, and dwarfs the US$20 billion they committed (most of it not new) on food security without any specifics as to where the money will come from.
The rest were mostly “recommitments”. The most pertinent signal was Italy’s spending of 400 million euros on the summit while its aid budget was cut in half in 2009 to 321 million euros.
We would commend to President Jagdeo that he offers the advice of Benjamin Franklin to his peers in CARICOM: either we hang together (in CARICOM) or we shall certainly hang separately.

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CARICOM, the crisis and help

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