Last week’s terse assessment of the state of the global economy and the prognosis for recovery from the current crisis by World Bank President Robert Zoellick would not have been encouraging for poor countries. Mr Zoellick said, among other things, that signs of recovery in developed countries do not necessarily signal a silver lining for developing ones and that if circumstances like shrinking markets, reduced remittance flows and sluggish investments persist the crisis could extend well into 2010. No less significant was the very pointed observation made by the World Bank President about the likely impact of a worsened financial and economic crisis on the poor in developing countries where job losses and attendant loss of spending power will continue to place more people on the breadline in circumstances where small national budgets contain no real social safety net provisions.
This year, the International Development Agency, the World Bank’s lending window that provides low-interest loans and grants to very poor countries have been inundated with applications from those countries that will push the Bank’s grant and lending levels to an all-time record high and will mean that unless the G20 countries come through on promises of more development aid some countries could be left without financing options.
In these circumstances Mr Zoellick urges countries to look to the private sector to lead the way in the recovery effort and this is where governments must respond by creating an environment in which business can thrive.
Here in Guyana the private sector continues to express a less than muted concern over what they consider to be obstacles to the robust response that is expected of the business community. There is still, for example, no real progress on the issue of tax reform, which, the Private Sector Commission said at the start of the year, would be on the very top of its agenda for engagement with the government. Then there is the slow pace of the movement towards the liberalization of the telecommunications sector – an eventuality which the President himself has said is a critical precursor to the expansion of the country’s IT sector and the creation of more jobs – and the uncertainties associated with the expansion of the agricultural sector through greater access to farm lands and the application of enhanced technology and far more significant levels of private sector investment in farming.
While there has long been a clear understanding that the global demand for more food creates regional and extra-regional market possibilities even in a condition of shrinking markets, the pace of the response to this opportunity continues to be deliberate and ponderous.
Particularly, while there appears to have been a consensus at the level of Caricom member states that increased regional food production is the only viable option to high food import bills which we can no longer afford, the response to the Jagdeo Initiative which seeks to provide large agricultural investment opportunities in Guyana has been, at best, lukewarm. Indeed, it is perhaps fair to say that the extent of the interest shown in the Jagdeo Initiative by other Caricom member states has really not moved beyond lip service.
Signs of frustration with the slow pace of regional movement on these critical issues have been reflected in suggestions that have been made by local private sector officials that the Single Market pursuits of the region are not working and that what they see as an expensive bureaucracy – the Caricom Secretariat – has to do much more than it is doing at the present time to facilitate the regional private sector.
It will be recalled too that the regional private sector had promised that it would use the opportunity created by last April’s Summit of the Americas in Port-of-Spain to seek to chart a course for the business community consistent with the role that it is expected to play in the economic recovery effort. Two months after the conclusion of the Summit we have heard nothing from the regional private sector.
The point about all this is that there appears to be – at the local as well as the regional levels- a familiar dilatoriness that belies the sense of urgency that ought to be demonstrated in the current circumstances. To make matters worse there is abundant evidence of divisions and bickering in the region over the provisions of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) and latterly, the assertiveness of the Barbadian government in enforcing an immigration policy that has resulted in the start of a process of repatriation to their respective countries of non-Barbadian Caricom nationals who have been living and working on the island for some time.
The concern about the repatriation issue is that it could quickly lead to the intensification of that sense of individualism that has persisted in the region even in the face of attempts to forge a sense of regional unity first, through Carifta and subsequently, through Caricom; and there is really no telling how all this will impact on what we are told is the importance of seeking to fashion a focused Caricom effort to help respond to the current economic crisis.
For these reasons next month’s Caricom Summit scheduled to be held here in Georgetown could be, perhaps, the most important regional gathering in recent years. Heads of Government must come to Georgetown armed with a sense of urgency about the collective challenge that the region faces and prepared to settle what, in the context of the professed commitment to a regional togetherness, are in fact the lesser issues. Hopefully, the recent pronouncements by the World Bank President and the Bank’s more detailed submission – Global Development Finance: Charting A Global Recovery – which is due to be released on Monday – will help to focus the minds of Caribbean Community leaders on the road ahead when they meet here next month.
