Patterson is right about Carib-Africa partnership

THE SUMMIT of African and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders that Barbados’ Mia Mottley planned to stage this year is now unlikely to be held in the manner she had hoped because of the COVID19 pandemic and the restrictions it has placed on large gatherings and international travel. Yet, the global spread of the virus has sharpened the logic for the summit as was persuasively argued last week by former Jamaican prime minister, P. J. Patterson, who is now statesman in residence at the Centre for Africa-Caribbean Policy Advocacy at The University of the West Indies, Mona, which bears his name.

Essentially, Mr Patterson posits that in the absence of effective global leadership, or a broad multilateralist response to the pandemic, Africa and the Caribbean face the risk of being marginalised and lacking a critical voice at the table for the shaping of the post-COVID-19 global architecture. This newspaper agrees.

When Ms Mottley, the Barbadian prime minister, first publicly mooted the summit in Nairobi last December, the idea had our backing in two broad contexts. One was our concern over Donald Trump’s trampling on the philosophy, and an erosion of the institutions of multilateralism, thereby rending the fabric by which poor and weak countries like Jamaica are afforded protection against the arbitrary actions of rich and powerful nations. There is safety in numbers.

SOUTH-SOUTH ECONOMIC COOPERATION

The second related issue was that the summit would be a fillip to that old, much-talked-about, but littleacted-on, idea of South-South economic cooperation, of which Jamaica was in the vanguard at its heights four decades ago. Mr Patterson, at the time, was Jamaica’s foreign minister before the conceptual frame of the idea was eventually displaced by globalisation.

COVID-19 is unlikely to overthrow the current deeply integrated world economy. However, the wide, and rapid, spread of the infection will energise critics of globalisation, or at least raise questions about supply chains whose production bottlenecks in one country cause shortages, or stall output, globally. All this has been exacerbated by the actions of governments domestically – including the closure of large portions of national economies – to slow the spread of the disease while scientists search for a vaccine, or effective drugs.

Indeed, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has projected that in a situation where the global gross domestic product (GDP) will fall by three per cent, the economies of Sub-Saharan Africa will this year contract by 1.6 per cent, the region’s sharpest reversal in a halfcentury. On a per-capita basis, the decline could be as deep as four per cent. The region’s two largest economies, Nigeria and South Africa, are expected to contract by 3.4 per cent and 5.2 per cent, respectively.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the Fund has projected that GDP will decline by 5.1 per cent in 2020. Most analysts, however, believe that in the heavily tourism-dependent countries of the region, the downturn could be deeper. None of this, of course, is helped by the fact that many of the countries of the two regions, especially the Caribbean, are heavily indebted.

Mr Patterson is right in describing the response to the crisis as a “palpable absence of global leadership”. And we share his view that the world will be much changed after COVID-19.

“The reconfiguration of global power and the restructuring of the global economy cannot be left to the market or the dictations of the few determined to continue to shape the future by unilateral decisions without international consultation,” he said.

We, for the most part, support that position. Except that placing restraint on unilateral power, and having protections against the laissez-faire attitudes, ought not to translate to ideologies, or policies, that presume the righteousness of the bureaucratic hand of the State over the wisdom of appropriately regulated markets and private enterprise.

After their virtual summit, a week ago, to coordinate the region’s response to COVID-19, CARICOM leaders are soon to reconvene to advance their initiative. Mr Patterson’s intervention should be on their agenda.

Indeed, if he is up to it, Mr Patterson should be invited to lead a team of regional experts, and other elder statesmen, to engage in dialogue with African counterparts on framing the two regions’ common position on the global issues. In the meantime, CARICOM must not only reaffirm with the African Union its interest in the summit, even if held virtually, but the urgency of the gathering.

The opinions on this page, except for The Editorial, do not necessarily reflect the opinions of The Gleaner.