GIVING A "human face" in marketing the benefits of the Caricom Single Market (CSME) remains a major challenge to the region's economic integration movement, 33 years after it was launched at Chaguaramas in Trinidad and Tobago.

Rickey Singh

This much was quite in evidence during the latest Heads of Government Conference even before the official release of the Communique on the 27th Caricoms Summit that concluded in St Kitts and Nevis on Thursday evening.

Now that the leaders of a dozen Caribbean Community states have finally managed to get their acts together, after some tension-filled negotiations, to launch the Caricom Single Market (CSM), the primary focus has shifted to completing the overall framework arrangements by 2008 for the much-discussed single regional economy to become a functioning reality shortly thereafter.

It has been a difficult and challenging task moving the process forward from the launch of Caricom in Trinidad and Tobago in 1973, to the two separate signing ceremonies for the inauguration of the CSM in 2006--first by six countries in Jamaica last January, and another half a dozen last Monday (July 3) in St Kitts.

A critical dimension to launching the 12-member CSM was reaching a compromise formula for contributions to the Caricom Development Fund (CDF), initially with a capital endowment of US$120 million.

MANNING. we cannot continue to merely come to the game, applaud the potential glory of the West Indies and retire to pavilions limited by our narrow shoreline; taking comfort and seeking raison d'tere in our separate flags and anthems and in our small sovereignties

The compromise was essentially based on the principle that countries to benefit the most must be the ones to contribute the most, and it managed to meet different concerns of the less developed economies of the OECS sub-region and Belize, as for the so-called 'More Developed Countries, among them Jamaica and Guyana.

However, translating satisfaction in milestones of Caricom's progress to giving the region's economic integration movement a human face, or making it what Prime Minister Owen Arthur speaks of as "a lived experience" is proving to be quite an enormous problem: That is the sensitive issue of intra-regional labour mobility, better and more popularly known as 'free movement of labour'...

It may well require involvement of our sporting and cultural icons, and I daresay, also greater professional commitment by the region's media in enabling the Caricom political directorate to overcome some very difficult hurdles, including the burden of parochialism and, worse, xenophobia, to complete by 2008 the infrastructure for the functioning, finally, of the envisaged common regional economy.

In other words, transforming what has for so many years been largely viewed as a mechanism for intra-regional trade and functional cooperation to a people-centred movement to sustain a seamless regional economy, even in the face of an apparent obsession by some about being "swamped by outsiders" (read that as "other" Caricom nationals).

Deal effectively with cross-border crimes and monitor closely elements from outside national borders whose lifestyles add to serious social problems, as well as those who exploit cheap migrant labour, or traffic in persons for prostitution. But let there be transparency in all that is done, and not misuse state institutions and agencies to engage in acts that hide deep-rooted insularism and/or social and ethnic prejudices that make a mockery of free movement of labour that's integral to the success of the emerging CSME.

In the words of the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Patrick Manning, who has been openly praised by his Community colleagues for his sterling contribution to help get the Development Fund off the floor-level: "Free movement of labour has been and continues to be the bugbear" in efforts at deepening the economic integration process...We must shed our mental shackles on this important matter. It is mostly essential for the way forward...

"We must change our attitudes to one another in fundamental ways in the Caribbean. Support of the cricket team doth not a West Indian civilisation make. We cannot continue to merely come to the game, applaud the potential glory of the West Indies, and retire to pavilions limited by our narrow shoreline; taking comfort and seeking raison d'tere in our separate flags and anthems and in our small sovereignties..."

Even Prime Minister Arthur, who has come under some sharp criticisms at home, particularly from callers to radio talk shows, for his advocacy for a better understanding why free movement of people was inevitable in the process of a functioning CSME, would readily empathise with the sentiment expressed by Manning.

But as leaders of two countries whose economies stand to benefit the most from the Caricom Development Fund, Prime Ministers Manning and Arthur themselves have much work to do at home in convincing, for a start, their respective immigration and customs officers about their own important roles in facilitating free movement of labour in the CSME experience.

This, of course, is a truism for all Community states now beating the drum of CSME-readiness.
Perhaps, the Community's governments may yet be enabled to deal in more practical terms with the problem of free movement from the plans to be unfolded in the form of a comprehensive regional security infrastructure for Cricket World Cup 2007.

Jamaica's National Security Minister Peter Phillips and Barbados' Deputy Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, made a relevant observation at a media briefing during last week's Caricom Summit: If the arrangements for the World Cup, including use of a standardised immigration form, no stamping of passports and compliance with a security vetting process, prove successful, then they could well be adopted to enhance hassle-free movement across the region in keeping with the spirit of labour and mobility under the CSME framework.

Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. Let us see how arrangements for "a safe and secured environment" for Cricket World Cup can be translated to providing a free movement-friendly environment that is integral for the functioning of a common economic space.

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