CARICOM Secretary General Edwin Carrington says the community is determined to complete the framework for the single economy by 2008.
In his New Year’s message, Carrington said that 2007 holds great promise but requires even deeper commitment as a people having taken the unprecedented step among developing economies to forge a Single Market and Economy.
Apart from consolidating the fledgling Single Market, he said that Caricom this year is determined to press on and complete the framework for the Single Economy by 2008. To achieve, he said, requires a lot of dedicated work and intense collaboration among the institutions of the Community and involving all sectors of the society – government, private sector, labour and civil society.
The single economy would include closer monetary and financial co-operation, integration of capital markets, common fiscal and investment policies, changes in corporate structures, harmonised taxation structures as well as exchange and interest rate policies. This process, he noted, has begun with a planned outreach programme in Belize and would eventually fan out to all Member States.
He said that a unique reward emanating from Caricom’s common approach is the opportunity to stage the Cricket World Cup 2007 functioning as a single domestic space in which the region would be welcoming the world as host, competing and hopefully winning the CWC 2007. Functioning as a single domestic space to host the CWC 2007, he said, “is most fitting as cricket is our oldest and certainly one of our most successful symbols of regional integration, along with the University of the West Indies. These are symbols of unity we must treasure.”
“We must also grasp this opportunity to ensure that this World Cup, the first to be held in such a large number of different venues – nine – is truly the best ever,” he said, adding that the region must also take advantage of the beneficial legacy it bequeaths and show the world that the Caribbean, quite apart from being a unique and desirable tourist destination, has people with the organisational skill to successfully stage a world-class event.
He said it was also within a united framework that Caricom was facing up to the challenge posed by HIV/AIDS. “We have been joined in this struggle by the wider Caribbean but despite the continuing success of this Pan Caribbean Partnership Against HIV/AIDS (PANCAP), the situation is such that there is no basis for complacency. Nor is there any, with regard to that other pervasive community social ill – crime. Both require the strongest and most sustained, concerted counter measures for their eradication,” he said.
On bringing Haiti more fully into the organs of Caricom, Carrington said that the Secretariat would soon be re-opening the CARICOM Representational Office in Port-au-Prince, as well as celebrating with the Haitian people, the 200th Anniversary of their Parliament. This activity would coincide with the observance of the 200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Carrington said that 2007 would see an unprecedented regional initiative with the proposed CARICOM/United States Conference on the Caribbean in Washington D.C.
The instability swirling around the global environment, he said, should drive Caribbean citizens to redouble their efforts to build, for themselves and their children, a stronger Caribbean Com-munity. “For it is only as such a unit that we can brave those winds, a realisation that has informed our approach to our external economic and trade negotiations, especially that for a beneficial Economic Partnership Agreement with the European Union,” he said.
He commended the Heads of Government who held the chairmanship for 2006: the Prime Minister of St Kitts and Nevis, Dr Denzil Douglas and Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Patrick Manning for the critical roles they played in ensuring the deepening of the integration process.
To the people of the region, he said that, “in CARICOM you have built over the past 34 years the longest existing and one of the most successful integration movements among developing nations – despite its continuing shortcomings. It is an achievement of which we can all be justly proud and one, which has been duly recognised by the unprecedented highest national award to the Community by the Government of Dominica. In many ways however, the journey has just begun. And it is a journey that, to be worthwhile, must lead us to a viable and prosperous Caribbean Community, one worthy of the highest aspirations of all its people, particularly the youth.” Carrington paid tribute to former United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan, former Prime Minister of Jamaica, P.J. Patterson and the former “regional airline” BWIA for their sterling contribution to the Caribbean and the world in general.
He said that 2006 was a year of undoubted progress with far-reaching implications for Caribbean integration beginning with the coming into being of the CARICOM Single Market. “This was a very significant milestone in the journey on which the Founding Fathers of CARIFTA embarked over a generation ago,” he said.
