PLACENCIA, Belize--Caribbean Community Caricom leaders have called for stocktaking to determine what is working well for the integration movement so that those elements can be retained and improved, while those that are hindering progress are discarded.
Speaking at their just-ended 27th Intersessional Meeting in Belize, Belize Prime Minister Dean Barrow, who has taken over as Caricom chairman, and outgoing Chairman Barbados’ Prime Minister Freundel Stuart made a strong case for that reassessment of the regional integration movement.
Speaking against the background of the challenging global economic conditions that continue to negatively impact the region, the host Prime Minister called for “a hard-headed assessment of where we are, where we need to go and how we get there.”
“We need to settle on achievable goals for the immediate and medium term, and specify and take the necessary steps for realisation on a time-and-action basis. In the process we may recognise, for example, that there is need for a workaround of the unbridgeable gap between our aspirations for a perfect single market and economy and individual circumstance and sovereignty constraints. The nimbleness and flexibility that must be deployed to adjust to the changing world circumstances may themselves militate against the centralised management mechanism that a full Caricom single economy posits, so that to be driven back to a reliance on the less lofty but more practical virtues of functional cooperation may be no bad thing,” the Caricom Chairman said.
He added that the Community needed to focus on “retaining and improving all that has worked” and intensify those aspects of the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME) “on which we are all fully agreed, and which we are all prepared fully to implement.”
“A more compressed canvas will surely sustain a more concentrated commitment. And that latter is what we as leaders owe to our people and to ourselves,” he told the other leaders.
Prime Minister Stuart shared similar views on the future direction of the integration movement.
“In order for Caricom to fulfil its immense promise, first we should look at the strengths of our movement and seek to retain them at all costs; second, we must look backward at important elements that we have lost in the regional integration movement and seek to reclaim them; third, we must look inward at our movement to carefully identify those aspects that hinder us, which we can discard, and should do so with some urgency,” the Barbadian leader said.
“We must then look forward to see what new or different measures we need urgently to adopt to ensure that our movement remains both vibrant and relevant in this 21st century, but more importantly, that it remains a sustainable project that continues to meet the needs of the people of the Caribbean.” ~ Caribbean360 ~
