-Heads agree at their 32nd Summit
THE financing of the Caribbean Community Secretariat was one of the major concerns of at least two CARICOM Heads of Government who addressed the opening ceremony of their 32nd regular meeting in St Kitts and Nevis on Thursday. Prime Minister of Barbados, Freundel Stuart, who threw down a blistering response to those whom he called ‘naysers and doomsayers’ of the integration movement, chronicled several milestone feats, which he stated that the Community had accomplished quietly and with no fanfare; and attributed those achievements to the efforts of the CARICOM Secretariat.
He hastened to point out that those ‘quiet’ achievements – in health, education, labour, youth, gender affairs, law and order, and regional security; in disaster preparedness and response; in environment and climate change – were remarkably accomplished with a meagre core budget of some 40 million EC dollars funded by Member States and with a staff of just over 300.
The Barbados Prime Minister insisted that there had to be another way to strengthen and ‘resource’ the CARICOM Secretariat so that it no longer had to rely on the generosity of external donors for 58% of its budget, and that its more senior and highly talented staff could be freed to focus less on the “routinised and more on the creative.”
President of Suriname, Desiré Delano Boutérse added his strong voice to that of Prime Minister Stuart and intimated that the CARICOM Secretariat was given the proverbial basket to fetch water.
“To me, it looks like we put a coin into the machine. We do all the necessary, but nothing comes out. We remain empty handed. And what do we do? Some of us start kicking the machine. We blame the Secretariat for everything that goes wrong within the Community,” President Bouterse added.
He expressed a firm belief that it was time to “bring forward ideas on how to mobilize the human and natural resources of Member States in a way that they provided for a solid economic basis that served our peoples and at the same time guaranteeing a sustainable source of funding of the Secretariat.”
President Bouterse noted that several Member States had suffered from the international financial crisis which had dire effects on their peoples and had deepened their vulnerability. The Community, he explained, would now need to find “creative ideas, meaningful programmes and result-oriented actions in order to get back on its feet.
He pointed to the CARICOM Secretariat as one of the important instruments in leading this charge.
However, he lamented that the Secretariat was not adequately resourced to do so, and pointed out that a substantial amount of its time was spent mobilising resources to support the Community’s mandates, leaving very little or no time to implement those mandates.
“We must break with this vicious circle,” he asserted; and opined that Member States should find more creative ways to share resources. He illustrated this by noting that Suriname had shared its vast resources in gold with Canada and the USA and suggested that a mechanism could be developed to ensure that those resources were shared with other CARICOM Member States.
“The question we have been asking ourselves is, why is it not possible to share some of this wealth with our CARICOM sister nations and at the same time guaranteeing a steady input of funds into the Community and its Organs?”

The answer, he stated, lay in the need for a substantial group of CARICOM entrepreneurs to develop CARICOM based lines of production and services.” This, the Suriname President stated, would provide a solid base for the integration process.
“One could look at tourism, air and maritime transport facilities as a Caribbean operation.  One could also consider agricultural and horticultural production within a CARICOM network of producers,” he asserted.
He added that Suriname had initiated a working group consisting of Surinamese and other Caribbean experts to produce a workable plan that could allow  more prudent sharing of resources and would soon circulate that plan to gain the inputs of other Member States.
The Suriname President explained that the feasibility of the format to be applied to the gold sector in Suriname as a CARICOM based gold company with downstream activities could serve as a model to develop other CARICOM member states’ linked companies.  (CARICOM Secretariat)