Negotiating with CARICOM

UNLESS THE commissioning of the Golding Report, and its recent debate by Parliament, were mere posturing, institutional reform of CARICOM will be Prime Minister Andrew Holness’ priority during his six-month chairmanship of the group, which began yesterday. So over the next two days, during their annual midyear summit in Montego Bay, Mr Holness should outline to his regional colleagues what he expects the realigned community to look like.

This newspaper wishes to offer the prime minister a few suggestions, one of which, essentially, is a reinforcement of an undertaking he has already given, but taking the matter a little bit further. He should formally, to the other heads of government, repudiate the implied threat, contained in the parliamentary resolution of June 19, of Jamaica’s withdrawal from CARICOM within five years, if Kingston doesn’t get what it wants from its regional partners as well as remove that arbitrary deadline for the Community to comply with all its obligations, as well as Jamaica’s vision of the group.

First, leaving CARICOM, either its economic or functional cooperation aspect, as Mr Holness clearly acknowledged with respect to the latter, wouldn’t be in Jamaica’s best interest. Second, setting arbitrary deadlines for things to be done is not the best way to win friends and influence people, especially when negotiating with partners.

These observations, of course, do not mean that there isn’t much for Jamaica to place on the table or that there shouldn’t be an acknowledgement of the substantial advances on CARICOM by this administration, and of Prime Minister Holness himself. Indeed, Mr Holness has, largely, brought Jamaica to a political consensus on the value of regional integration and the CARICOM arrangement in particular.

It used to be the case that the Jamaica Labour Party government was wary of deepened integration, fearing, as one of its leaders, Edward Seaga, once put it, a new West Indies Federation via the “backdoor”. Mr Holness, however, has made it clear that Jamaica wants to be in CARICOM but complains of the Community’s implementation deficit, including the group’s slowness in transforming itself into a genuine single market and economy.

It was, in part, against that backdrop that the Golding task force proposed that Jamaica insist on CARICOM’s acceleration of its transition to a single economy, without, in our view, sufficiently taking into account the domestic political ramifications, including for Jamaica, of the ceding of sovereignty– especially with regard to monetary policy– implicit in a single economy. The Golding task force had set a five-year deadline for the project’s completion.

Mr Holness retreated from the Golding Report’s quest for an urgent foray into the single economy, settling instead for a genuine single market, buttressed by enhanced, and in some cases, new, governance mechanisms. But the resolution approved by Parliament maintained the five-year deadline for CARICOM’s compliance lest Jamaica “further evaluate its terms of engagement” with the community, “if stated and agreed commitments are not implemented by all member states within the agreed time frame”.

GOOD HAND IF CREATIVELY USED

Mr Holness explained that this doesn’t mean withdrawing from CARICOM, implying that Jamaica, in such a circumstance, would still be in the Community’s functional cooperation arrangements, similar, perhaps, to The Bahamas. But as Anthony Hylton, the opposition parliamentarian, pointed out, The Bahamas, unlike Jamaica, had neither an industrial nor an agricultural base, and, therefore, had little to benefit from CARICOM’s market or protection by its common external tariff. Further, global partners aren’t keen on negotiating bilateral trade deals with the small economies of the Caribbean. They insist on agreements with the group. Mr Holness, however, is not without a good hand to play, if it is creatively deployed. He, however, has to recognise the interests and sensibilities of his CARICOM partners as well as Jamaica’s strategic position in the community.

Kingston is both the group’s most important market, absorbing most of CARICOM’s intra-regional trade, as well as the community’s political leader. Trinidad and Tobago is its economic powerhouse.

Together, like France and Germany in the European Union, they can lead the CARICOM agenda, with support from Barbados, which, especially, under its new leader, Mia Mottley, with her strong intellectual support for regionalism, provides a bridge to the regional subgroup, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States. In the short term, though, Jamaica can extract value from CARICOM by continuing to enhance the competitiveness of its economy.