Editorial | Energising CARICOM

As the incoming chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), Mia Mottley’s New Year’s message had a familiar ring.

CARICOM, the Barbadian prime minister pledged, would pursue its mission of transforming the community into a full-fledged single market and economy – the CSME. That project, she said, was slowed by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the 15-member organisation to focus its attention elsewhere.

“But five years on, we must resume our work on the CSME,” Ms Mottley said. “For this is not merely an economic agenda. It is a vision of unity and opportunity for small states who know that we can achieve so much more together than we do so individually.

“Full realisation of the CSME, including above all else, yes, the free movement of our nationals, is essential for unlocking the true potential of our people and our economies.”

This newspaper agrees with Ms Mottley about the value of regional integration, and especially its potential for unlocking in CARICOM, as a unit, economic and political strengths greater than the sum of the individual parts of its members.

We also hear Ms Mottley’s explanation for the recent hiatus on the CSME. In other circumstances we might have been sympathetic. Except for two reasons.

First, CARICOM’s cooperation and coordination at the height of the pandemic in, among other things, sourcing vaccines and mobilising fiscal support for the Caribbean, highlighted the merits of integration. Indeed, Ms Mottley’s personal advocacy on this front, including the intellectual leadership she provided via her Bridgetown Initiative for global financial reforms, must be highly commended.

Second, CARICOM has been on the CSME journey for three and a half decades, since its leaders, in their Grand Anse Declaration of 1989, set out their ambition to advance their customs union to a single market. In 2002, the amendments to the CARICOM treaty were in place to facilitate the CSME; and in 2006, the single market was formally launched at a summit in Jamaica.

“In a few years, we must successfully tackle the harmonisation of economic, monetary, fiscal and trade policies of participating member states, to enable the second pillar, the single economy, to enter into force,” the then Jamaican prime minister, P.J. Patterson, said at a formal launch of the CSME in Kingston in January 2006. “It is my ardent hope that we will not retreat in the face of these challenges.”

STILL STRUGGLING

Nearly two decades on, CARICOM is still struggling with the single market element of the project, most starkly in its failure to fully implement the free movement of labour, to complement what has largely been achieved with respect to capital.

Some categories of workers are allowed free movement under a cumbersome regime for people with certain skills or in a handful of job classifications. But at a summit in 2023, the community’s heads of government, ahead of CARICOM’s 50th anniversary, agreed to remove all barriers to free movement by March 31, 2024.

“We understand that there are some challenges for some, but we are committed to this,” Roosevelt Skerrit, prime minister of Dominica, said at the time.

Antigua and Barbuda – which, with its partners in the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), is party to free movement of labour in that sub-group – subsequently declared its wish for a derogation from the wider CARICOM arrangement. Other countries may have had reservations, but which ones it is, is not clear.

To put it bluntly: fully free movement is stalled.

Yet, in early 2022, the heads of government agreed an amendment to the treaty, allowing dual-track approaches to projects if all members are not ready to implement agreements. In essence, willing parties could go ahead once a third of the members are ready and the others do not object.

On that basis, the free movement of labour would seem a likely candidate for this dual-track arrangement, unless the cause of the glitch is deeper than is apparent.

OTHER MATTERS

Which brings us to two other matters that Ms Mottley should place on CARICOM’s agenda, and pursue with vigour, during her chairmanship.

Things have improved slightly over the decades, but the community has to be far more transparent and do a better job in communicating with its constituents.

Background analyses and policy documents that inform CARICOM’s discussions and decisions are not widely available or easily accessible. And the community’s technocrats tend to talk in a kind of institutional gobbledygook, seemingly designed for obfuscation rather than providing information.

Second, Ms Mottley should prod her colleagues to look for new skill sets in the community’s secretary general and allow that person to give full expression to those talents, not least of which must be the ability to communicate and a willingness to take risks.

It is our sense that at present, the secretariat largely acts as a technical clearing house for summits and ministerial meetings. It undertakes little ‘political’ work. Yet, we perceive the job as secretary general, in part, as consensus-builder and public prodder.

Indeed, when the current secretary general was assuming the posts, this newspaper urged her not to be risk-averse; to be willing to grasp issues and get ahead of leaders; and to speak directly to CARICOM citizens in building regional consensus around matters on which there is already agreement. In some instances, the secretary general has to be advocate-in-chief.

In other words, we are looking for a secretary general that redefines the job and imbues it with passion – as Ms Mottley does hers.