EDITORIAL: Looking ahead to this week’s annual Summit

THIS week Caribbean Community leaders will be meeting in Jamaica for their annual summit. Should we hold our breath that some new life will be injected into the 45-year-old integration process, or will be it be the same old thing where promises are made and no follow ups, thereby leading again to the view that the implementation deficit remains very much in tact once these meetings are over and leaders settled back into their communities?

There were calls for a change in attitude along this line when the leaders met earlier this year in Haiti for their annual intersessional meeting. Grenada’s Prime Minister Dr. Keith Mitchell advised his colleagues that they cannot continue to agree on closed door positions only to publicly push a different agenda.
Barbados’ Prime Minister, The Honourable Mia Amor Mottley, will be attending her first Heads of Government Summit as Prime Minister of Barbados, one of the founding members of CARICOM. Since she is down to address the opening ceremony on Wednesday, it will be interesting to see how she intends to deal with this thing called regional integration.

Since becoming Prime Minister of Barbados on May 24 this year, Ms. Mottley attended a meeting of leaders of the Organization of East Caribbean States (OECS) in St. Lucia where integration in the sub region like the wider Caribbean, remains a work in progress. However, that meeting opened the door for closer collaboration between Barbados and the seven nations making up the OECS. How to improve trade, getting the Caribbean Single Market and Economy on a forward march, the push for further integration, the free movement of people around the region, tourism, and more recently climate change, are subjects that have dominated the deliberations by regional Heads each time they have met. The intersessional summit was aimed at seeking to advance plans for to further strengthen elements of the CSME, transportation issues, the blacklisting some Caribbean countries as tax havens and non cooperative jurisdictions, ways to combat transnational organized crime and to deal with climate change. The latter (climate change) came against the background of the severe damage to some Caribbean countries caused by hurricanes last year.

What is also of interest is how far the region has gone in the reform programme which was mooted some years ago. In recent years CARICOM leaders have been grappling with that programme, which is aimed at restructuring the integration movement. It would be recalled that in July 2014 at the 35th meeting in Antigua and Barbuda a strategic plan was approved. The plan was titled: “Strategic Plan for the Caribbean Community, 2015 -2019: Repositioning CARICOM.” There was considerable enthusiasm about the plan since according to the Caribbean Centre for Money and Finance, it is a major milestone for the region and it represented the first detailed plan of a way forward for CARICOM. The CMCF recalled that the plan identified some integrated strategic priorities for 2015 to 2019. The priorities include plans to accelerate implementation and use of the CSME; introduce measures for macro-economic stabilization; build competitiveness; human capital development; advance health and wellness; deepen foreign policy coordination; and among others; develop a single secure ICT space. The leaders therefore have a lot on their plate and our wish is for a good outcome to the Summit.