Addressing the 25th Inter-Sessional Meeting of Caricom in Grenada on Monday St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves listed trade and economic integration, agriculture, tourism, air transport and financial services as areas of accomplishment though he added, “there is a great deal left to be done to realise the full fruition of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas.”
In an address that dealt in large measure with issues that are key and critical to the economic development of the region, Gonsalves told the assembled regional Heads of Government that Caricom is compelled at this time to reflect centrally on measures for strengthening our regional and national economies.” He listed the fortification of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), the challenge of climate change, improving the delivery
of air and sea transport, enhancing citizen security, facilitating socio-economic development through Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and better coordinating the region’s foreign and external trade policies, “including the settling of negotiating stances for the finalisation of the Canada-Caricom trade pact” as issues that must be addressed if the fortunes of the region are to be taken seriously.
And according to the Vincentian Prime Minister, “It is the frustrating, unfulfilled potential of Caricom which prompts stinging critiques, including a justifiable sense in some quarters that this regional body is unequally yoked and thus allocates or distributes its benefits too unevenly.”
In an address that confronted the issue of the regional movement’s critics, Gonsalves said he believed that many of the criticisms stem, in large measure, from “illusions about Caricom’s nature and its institutional arrangements. Caricom is not a central government; it is not a unitary state; it is not a federation; it is not even a confederation.
“The Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas conceives it as a community of sovereign states. Its centre has been deliberately designed as a weak superstructure which constantly gropes for consensus. That is what the political market can bear; that is the reality which the broad citizenry in the community has endorsed. Neither the political leadership as a collective nor the populations as a whole have an appetite for much more than what is currently on offer in the treaty commitments,” Gonsalves said.
And according to the Vincentian Prime Minister, while the Caricom Secretariat is frequently criticised for failure to implement decisions of the regional movement “the Secretariat is not Caricom; it is the central administrative instrument of Caricom but it possesses no authority to compel enforcement of decisions of the various Councils of Ministers and the Heads of State and Government Conference. In the absence of an executive Caricom Commission, buttressed by the requisite constitutional or legal authority, the central responsibility for the implementation of Caricom’s decisions rests with the governments of the individual nation-states,” Gonsalves added.
