Intra-regional trade
Observers of what, up to this time, have been largely fruitless efforts to forge a regional food security pact that can, among other things, reduce expenditure on extra-regional food imports whilst upgrading the nutritional quality of the region’s food intake, may well be wondering whether the contribution made by President Irfaan Ali at the recent Trinidad and Tobago Manufacturers’ Association (TTMA) President’s Dinner and Award Ceremony will do anything to advance the process of regional food security or whether it will simply join the plethora of high-sounding pronouncements that have been made on the issue over the years.
The regional food security discourse long predates President Ali’s accession to office, so that, for now at least, it is to the fruitless efforts of his predecessors to remedy the problem that one must first look in addressing this issue.
How the Caribbean can optimise the glaring opportunities that lie before it to maximise intra-regional cooperation on the food security issue remains high on the list of timeworn issues discussed, at one time or another in the regional media. Some might even venture to say, with considerable justification, that the issue of navigating the way towards a food-secure regional environment is one of those issues on which Caribbean governments and the Caribbean Community, as a whole, have failed… miserably. This is not the first time that we have pondered on the nowarchived tomes that have been ‘turned out’ by regional experts on the subject.
How the region can optimise the opportunities that exist for maximising intra-regional cooperation in this area was, to a considerable extent, the subject of the Guyanese President’s virtual presentation to the recent high-profile Port-of-Spain event, and while it would be unfair to judge the impact of what he had to say without allowing for at least some modest passage of time, it has to be said that his presentation had about it, the same polemical ring that we have heard from some of his predecessors. If, for example, the President can be excused for displaying a sense of impatience over what has been a protracted ‘trade war’ between Guyana and CARICOM sister state, Trinidad and Tobago, in dismissing the condition as “nonsensical,” one wonders whether he is not placing the blame for this condition in the laps of predecessor political administrations in Georgetown and Port-of-Spain that have failed, several rounds of bilateral engagement notwithstanding, to remove that “nonsensical” problem.
Nor was there, it seems, sufficient mindfulness, in terms of context, in the Department of Public Information report on what the President had to say. It reported an “impassioned proposal to connect the manufacturing and services sectors of Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago” that was made “in the context of the myriad opportunities that could be capitalized on in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) if all members remove the barriers to trade.”
What is needed to create an open and unfettered intra-CARICOM trading regime is not an unending restatement of the problem, but deliberate, sustained, and focussed initiatives that focus unerringly on the removal of the barriers. Amongst some CARICOM countries, more than others, there has been a demonstrable intention to torpedo that process.
Put differently — however hard we try, the reality is that those barriers simply cannot be wished away. As relevant as the theme of the President’s address at the Port-of-Spain Chamber event was, he may well have felt constrained by what one might call the ‘diplomatic circumstances’ of the occasion for laying down the ‘bottom line’ on regional trade barriers.
If President Ali is prepared to tackle the challenge of untying the knots that restrain free and unfettered trade between Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, in the first instance and, moreover, to move on from there to have that achievement impact positively on intra-regional trade on the whole, then, in that particular respect, he would have done considerably more than any of his predecessors.