(CARICOM Secretariat) Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago need to provide focused leadership to the integration movement, according to Dr. the Hon. Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
Prime Minister Gonsalves said that notwithstanding the vital importance of member states of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), The Bahamas, Belize, Haiti, and Suriname,  “the Big Four” – founding members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) – must, in a coordinated way, “drive, pull or push the regional juggernaut”.

Sharing his vision for the Community’s way forward at the opening of the Thirty-Second Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government in St. Kitts and Nevis last Thursday, Prime Minister Gonsalves said that the Region had to appreciate the combined and uneven development of the integration movement, which could be attributed to domestic considerations taking priority over optimal regional activity, and stressed the importance of leadership by the four member states.

The Region, he said, could no longer afford the luxury of “such relative non-engagement” and added that if such a situation existed among the four member states, it inexorably led to the diminution of engagement by others.

“It was perhaps inevitable that the change in government in Trinidad and Tobago in May 2010 would have resulted in a greater emphasis on domestic, rather than on regional, matters. I feel sure that the government of Trinidad and Tobago, which is populated by committed regionalists, would again be at the fore in pushing the regional agenda on all fronts.

“The simple truth is that on the large strategic concerns, the line between the ‘national’ and the ‘regional’ is blurred to the point of non-existence.  Globalisation and the altered architecture of the international political economy have caused this to be so,” Dr. Gonsalves posited.

Urging that facts be squarely faced, Dr. Gonsalves said that no credible, sustainable regional solution to the challenges of CLICO and British-American Insurance Company (BAICO) was possible, without the active involvement of the government of Trinidad and Tobago. The same holds, he said, for other issues including trade, regional governance, regional security, regional air and sea transportation, energy, health and education.

“The leadership of Trinidad and Tobago, and indeed of the ‘Big Four’, does not in any way mean a diminution of the importance on leadership of the other member states of CARICOM. I simply make a salient point of practical politics in going forward,” he said.

Turning to the developments in the OECS, Prime Minister Gonsalves said that the grouping had moved resolutely and in solidarity towards the establishment of an OECS Economic Union in January 2011.

He reported that by August 1, 2011, there would be complete freedom of movement of citizens among the six member-states of the Economic Union – Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines – while governance arrangements to suit the “more profound OECS Union” were altered.

“This deepening of the OECS Union beyond the current parameters of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas and a functioning CARICOM clearly demands an amendment to the CARICOM Treaty itself, to take account judicially of the explicit special and differential treatment of the member-states of the OECS,” Dr. Gonsalves said.

He added that the OECS had a range of issues that were targeted for resolution within the framework of CARICOM, with priority being given to the reality that OECS member-states “do not benefit proportionately or at all from the ‘single market’ arrangements in CARICOM”.

“Indeed, the CARICOM trading regime has contributed to the denudation of the manufacturing base in the OECS without necessarily benefiting the OECS consumer in terms of competitive price and quality. Further, the compensating mechanisms in the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, which are designed to assist the ‘disadvantaged’ countries of the OECS, have been insufficiently rolled out. We look forward with great interest to the next round of financing for the CARICOM Development Fund, mandated as an obligation under Article 158 of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. CARICOM, in its trading and ‘single market’ manifestations, is unlikely to survive unchallenged if it continues to be too highly skewed or unequally yoked in favour of one or two of the ‘Big Four’.