Indications in the press this week that the Heads of Government will consider the issue of the relationship between the Caricom Secretariat and the Caricom Regional Negotiating Machinery, serve to remind us that since the deliberations and decisions of the Heads at their last Conference in July last year, nothing further has been heard on implementation of measures agreed for Caricom’s reorganization, based on the Report of the Technical Working Group (TWG) on Governance, Managing Mature Regionalism.

The decision to examine the Secretariat-CRNM relationship is obviously an ad hoc one, stemming from a feeling, apparently both from outside and within the Secretariat itself, that some of the controversy, and now obvious ill-feeling deriving from the initialing of the EU-Cariforum Economic Partner-ship Agreement (EPA), stems from a lack of liaison and networking between the two institutions during the course of the negotiations on the EPA.

Ironically, the TWG report, in its recommendation for the establishment of a Caricom Commission, placed some emphasis on the need for an integration of the CRNM into the overall institutional management of Caricom’s functions, instead of maintaining the stand-alone relationship of the CRNM vis-