-After Montego Bay, same ole’ story
THE 31st regular annual Heads of Government Conference of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) concluded in Montego Bay, Jamaica Wednesday with a low offering for optimism in the immediate future progress of the now 37-year-old regional economic integration movement.

Having initially raised hope midway of the four-day event for a new approach to ensure realistic management appropriate for today’s challenges from the global economic and political crisis, the leaders were to back-off by closing time.

Not surprisingly, they postponed for another ‘special meeting’, scheduled for September this year, when they will consider likely alternative governing models for better management.

In its normally lively ‘discussion forum’, the BBC Caribbean Service has been encouraging responses to the provocative question: ‘Does CARICOM have a future?’

That was while the Community’s Heads of Government were still wrestling with the cynicism and disenchantment their inactions have spawned over repeated failures to implement decisions, unanimously taken, for progress towards CARICOM’s Single Market and Economy (CSME).

Even before the final communique was released, comments flowing from an end-of-summit press conference on Wednesday clearly signalled  that the elusive governance issue had once again emerged as a barrier the leaders are yet to scale.

Diminishing credibility
It is a failure that could only deepen concerns over the leaders’ credibility to make a reality of the Community’s flagship project — either in the remaining years of this decade or the next — of a single economic space in a region that constitutes a microcosm of the world’s peoples, cultures and varying levels of social and economic development.

Often viewed among Latin American, African and Asian bloc of countries as a cohesive and productive experiment in regional economic integration, CARICOM has clearly done reasonably well in wide-ranging areas of functional cooperation and foreign policy coordination.

When, however, it comes down to implementation of decisions on major issues involving critical segments of its treaty-based arrangements for inauguration of a single market and economy, therein lies the rub.

Their failures are rooted in lack of collective political will to overcome parochialism and a narrow sense of nationalism in favour of a shared vision of  ‘one people, one market, one Caribbean’ — to which they all claim commitment.

Consequently, the spreading sense of alienation and defeatism, if not the ‘despair’ alluded to in the BBC Caribbean discussion forum on ‘CARICOM’s future’.

The announcement by Prime Minister Golding, in his capacity as CARICOM’s new chairman, that a committee of Prime Ministers has been identified to come forward with proposals for the forthcoming ‘special meeting of Heads’ in September to address alternative forms of governance, cannot seriously be considered as anything of significance.

The Community has gone that way before with ‘Prime Ministerial Working Groups’ and high-level Committees of regional technocrats. The coming September meeting seems destined to do what Trinidadians like to equate as ‘spinning top in mud’.

Amid the expanding words-game on CARICOM’s future governance, more Heads of Government are now complaining against ‘talk’ and urging ‘action’.

They may be simply reprimanding themselves, but in the current circumstances, the self-rebuke is welcome.

Ironically, in rushing to announce a prime ministerial committee to consider a new ‘governance’ architecture, the leaders present in Montego Bay seem to have forgotten to include the Prime Minister of Belize, Dean Barrow.

After all, in CARICOM’s quasi-cabinet system, Barrow holds lead responsibility for Governance and Justice. Or did he decline to serve?