Part 9: ‘Most Successful CARICOM Engagement in 15 Years!’

THE Agri-Investment Forum (held in Guyana from 19 to 21 May), attended by regional Heads of Government and delegations representing Caribbean private farmers and public entities from across the region and beyond, has come in for top praise from a top Caribbean Community (CARICOM) diplomat, who sees it as the region’s most important gathering in the past 15 years.

Sir Ron Saunders, a Guyana-born veteran diplomat who currently serves as Ambassador of Antigua & Barbuda to the Organization of American States (OAS), as well as to the United States (US), says the forum “was arguably the most successful engagement by CARICOM leaders in the last 15 years.”

Writing in his May 26th weekly commentary on regional and international affairs that “The Forum was held amidst an enlarging global calamity that combines high prices for oil with shortages and record-high prices for food and agricultural inputs such as fertilizers.” The veteran diplomat recalled that “On the eve of the forum, a joint survey by the CARICOM Secretariat and World Food Programme (WFP) had already sent clear-enough warning signals.

The CARICOM-WFP survey had estimated that severe food insecurity in the Caribbean had increased by 72% since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020.

In addition, the World Bank reported that the price of fertilizers had increased by as much as 178% between March 2021 and March 2022.

Explaining why he rated the recent forum in Georgetown as he did, Sanders wrote, “For much of the last 15 years, CARICOM governments had ‘paused’ efforts to establish a Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME).”

Another reason, he added, was that “Among the important things that suffered was a 2005 agreement to operationalize a ‘Framework for the Repositioning of Caribbean Agriculture,’ which came to be known as ‘The Jagdeo Initiative’ after Bharat Jagdeo, then President of Guyana, who spearheaded it.”

According to Sir Ron, “When the ‘Jagdeo Initiative’ was agreed, but not implemented in 2005, CARICOM’s food-import bill was US$1.8 billion but at the end of 2021, it was more than US$5 billion.”

Antigua and Barbuda’s prime minister, Gaston Browne, had also earlier recalled on Opening Day at the forum, “Our region failed to implement the 2005 ‘Jagdeo Initiative’, and, over the last 17 years, we have suffered for our inaction”.

And the same was said by Dominica’s Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit.

Trinidad and Tobago’s prime minister, Keith Rowley, also recalled at the opening ceremony, that “when vaccines were needed by every nation in the world to save lives and control COVID-19, a few rich nations bought and hoarded more than 70% of the vaccine production.”

And he warned: “Nobody is going to give us food when it is in short supply. We have to act now, so that next time we would be in a better position.”

Ambassador Sanders says the crisis “set the stage for the CARICOM leaders, at the Forum in Guyana, to take action that would upset the status quo and forge a pathway to meaningful integration of CARICOM’s resources.”

But, he added, there were “two further ingredients that led to the Forum’s action.”

The first was that “a plan existed to tackle food insecurity, introduced at the March 2022 CARICOM heads of government meeting by Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali.”

Putting the Ali plan in closer focus, he wrote: “In the last two months with food shortages increasing and prices rising, the plan and its implementation assumed great relevance and urgency and the leaders at the forum seized the moment and agreed on priority areas.”

Ambassador Sanders quoted extensively from the Outcome Statement that followed the forum, in which the leaders committed to “tackling food insecurity, removing tariffs on CARICOM goods, and establishing regional transportation to get regionally produced food to every country in the region.”

On Food Insecurity, according to the Outcome Statement, President Ali will organize an existing Ministerial Task Force to produce an implementation schedule for Guyana’s current plan for regional food security.

Regarding tariffs and non-tariff barriers imposed on CARICOM products, a Special Committee, headed by Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley will immediately prepare proposals, with time-bound deadlines, for eliminating such trade barriers.

“Should this happen,” Ambassador Sanders wrote, the ‘pause’ on creating a single market might, at last, be released.”

However, according to Sir Ron, there was “another reason for the forum’s motivation and success,” which he identified as “the passion of Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali.”

The diplomat, who’s seen the cost of inaction between the Jagdeo Initiative and the Ali Plan, noted: “Not only did he have a food plan ready, but he was also fervent in his determination to deliver it.

“His enthusiasm infected his colleagues and influenced the forum’s result to produce actionable proposals with firm deadlines for implementation.”

Guyana-born Sir Ron is among the best well-placed to make these pertinent observations, having had the good fortune of relating in different capacities to every President of Guyana from Forbes Burnham to Desmond Hoyte, Cheddi and Janet Jagan, Bharrat Jagdeo, Donald Ramotar, David Granger and Irfaan Ali.

Based in Washington, Ambassador Sanders served as Antigua & Barbuda’s High Commissioner to the UK in the 1970s and was that country’s candidate for the position of Secretary-General of the Commonwealth in 2018.

Sir Ron is currently Dean of the Diplomatic Corps at the OAS, and his long tenure in the CARICOM diplomatic service allows him to well recall the ups and downs in regional unity.

He says the forum also restored some of the lost faith in the regional project, which is another basis for his very high marks for the Guyana Forum, which he explains this way:

“For those who were around in the late 1960s and 1970s when CARIFTA [Caribbean Free Trade Area] was created and CARICOM emerged, the atmosphere and results of the Guyana Forum rekindled a new faith in regionalism – and the hope that fidelity to it will prevail.”