Halt a new drift by CARICOM

IT’S EIGHTEEN months since the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) summit in Montego Bay that caused this newspaper, despite the disappointments of the past, to be hopeful about the community accelerating its transition to a single market, including a more efficient system of decision-making. It is urgent that regional leaders demonstrate to their constituency that this optimism, cautious though it was, was not in vain.

The expectation rested, primarily, on the advent of two personalities into the regional leadership – Jamaica’s prime minister, Andrew Holness, and his Barbadian counterpart, Mia Mottley.

It isn’t our sense that Mr Holness approaches CARICOM from a deeply philosophical base or profound sense of history that contemplates the Caribbean’s place in the world. Mr Holness would, perhaps, assess himself as a political and economic pragmatist who brings a transactional disposition to global relations.

He instinctively appreciates the logic of conglomeration that CARICOM represents: that the aggregate of the unit is greater than the sum of its parts. In keeping with this assessment, Mr Holness has edged his Jamaica Labour Party away from its historic wariness of regional integration towards an embrace of CARICOM as a market to be exploited. It helped, of course, that Jamaica has, recently, been undertaking a major reform of its economy that is making its industries more competitive.

Mr Holness’ stance on CARICOM is significant on two fronts.

Although for a long time Jamaica was the community’s economic laggard, it remained, in terms of the value of intra-regional trade, the community’s largest market. Kingston, in that regard, has muscle to flex. Second, Jamaica has achieved global diplomatic prestige and status well beyond its size and power, which, despite recent hiccups, establishes it as the community’s political leader.

Ms Mottley has, by instinct, intellect and personal history. It was fortuitous that the Montego Bay summit was not only Ms Mottley’s first as Barbados’ prime minister, but that her country has responsibility in the community for monitoring its transition to a regional single market and economy.

The process, therefore, would benefit from her formidable intellect and alliance with Mr Holness and, hopefully, Keith Rowley, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, CARICOM’s largest and most industrialised economy. Theirs would be the engine driving CARICOM into a new phase of existence.

Yet, a year after Montego Bay, at their summit in St Lucia last July, the heads of government had cause to lament “the slow pace and level of implementation” of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) “and the lack of urgency exhibited by some member states in enacting the necessary legislation and putting in place the administrative measures for implementation”.

In other words, it was business as usual in CARICOM: a failure by member states to adhere to undertakings, even when they agreed that it was in the region’s best interest.

NEW WAYS OF COMMUNICATING

The problem is one that CARICOM has grappled with since its inception. It remains a partnership of sovereign states, with no supranational authority to enforce decision, or to impose sanctions when members fail so to do. With this wariness of ceding power to a centre, the community has failed to design an effective compensating mechanism. In the absence of alternative forces driving member states into action, we expect that CARICOM’s implementation deficit will continue into 2020, limiting the community’s ability of achieving the economic breakthrough on which it was predicated, thus making it more susceptible to global shocks. While the community struggles over an effective governance model, there are things that can be done to improve upon this failure of implementation.

The issues, for instance, should be put frontally to the Caribbean people. That requires new ways of communicating.

CARICOM – its leaders, its secretariat, its institutions – speak in jargon rather than intelligibly communicate with people. Few in the community know what are to be implemented to make the CSME work, who are the laggards and how the decisions, if implemented, will impact their lives. These facts need to be translated from bureaucratise to the language of people and communicated on channels without bureaucratic dissonance, and to which people listen.

CARICOM leaders, too, need to speak more often among themselves. Summits twice a year, given the work to be done, are insufficient.