One hopes that Prof Norman Girvan’s recent meeting, in his capacity as the Personal Representative of the UN Secretary General in the Guyana-Venezuela border controversy, with President Donald Ramotar and Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett, also provided the opportunity for engagement on matters relating to the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME).
Prof Girvan is, after all, well known as a committed regionalist. His body of work on Caribbean economic development includes the 2007 report for Caricom heads of government, ‘Towards a Development Vision and the Role of the Single Economy,‘ intended as a road map – unfortunately, largely ignored by governments – for the further implementation of the CSME. In addition, he was one of the authors of ‘Re-energising Caricom Integration,’ Grenada Prime Minister Tillman Thomas’s proposals to last May’s Mazaruni Retreat of heads, aimed at addressing, among other things, the so-called implementation deficit and prioritising the benefits of economic integration.
That retreat, however, only reinforced a sense of unwillingness and inability on the part of member states to accelerate the regional integration process. The lack of progress, following meeting after meeting of the region’s leaders and technocrats, has generally been attributed by a sceptical public to an absence of political will, tacitly acknowledged by the heads themselves, in their agreement last July in St Kitts to put “a pause on specific elements” of the CSME.
The empirical evidence supports this perception. Just this week, a series of studies covering the last three years, by the Caricom Secretariat, indicated that the CSME is operating at a level of about 64 per cent compliance overall, with regard to its five core regimes: free movement of skills; free movement of goods; free movement of services; movement of capital; and the right of establishment. According to the Secretariat, these regimes “are functioning but not at the level of effectiveness anticipated by Caricom.”
Guyana is not generally regarded as one of the recalcitrant states. Indeed, with its huge land mass and natural resources potential but weak human resource, technological and capital bases, Guyana stands to benefit greatly from the free movement of factors of production. This has been broadly recognised by successive governments ever since the creation of the CSME was promulgated in Grenada in 1989.
Now, Guyana is increasingly viewed as the coming country in Caricom. We are currently enjoying a period of sustained economic growth that compares favourably with the rest of the region, and our agro-industrial potential and untapped natural resources may well hold the key to the region’s future viability.
It therefore must be in our and the region’s best interests to focus again on a common regional development policy, something on which Prof Girvan has written and lectured on at length. President Ramotar and Ms Rodrigues-Birkett would have done well to pick his brains on this matter, once the important consultations on the border issues were completed.
They might have exchanged ideas on why the legal and institutional structures of the CSME do not seem to have been matched by tangible progress and growth across the region. They could have brainstormed on how to boost intra-regional trade, beyond Trinidad and Tobago’s traditional dominance. They might even have sought advice on how to overcome the limitations inherent in integrating the markets of small economies.
If they had pursued such a line of discussion, they would probably have realised that expanding the internal regional market is not enough and they would have concluded that it is necessary to pursue industrialization and manufacturing aimed at exporting more to international markets. And they would no doubt have reaffirmed the basic principles of freeing up the movement of capital, services and skills, and would have, logically, revisited the argument for the integration of production.
We do not need to be hamstrung by the challenges posed by the transition from preference dependence to more globalised competition and the commensurate need for increased competitiveness. For Guyana and the rest of Caricom, the CSME, with its overarching objective of deeper regional economic integration and its architecture for achieving this, remains the best option for rationalising production, increasing productivity and enhancing competitiveness.
Perhaps the time has come for Guyana to show leadership in Caricom, by not only championing the CSME as an appropriate model of regional integration and development, but by also seizing the opportunity afforded by the CSME and its core regimes to put in place a transparent, enabling environment for attracting investment, technology and skills, aimed at integrating regional supply chains and increasing value-added production.
