In recent years, Caricom’s annual heads of government meetings have grabbed the headlines for what they have failed to achieve – and this year’s meeting was no exception. In an editorial of March 2, 2011, the Observer reflected this opinion and joined a growing anti-Caricom movement by chastising the 22nd Inter-Sessional Meeting of the regional body held in Grenada for wasting time by procrastinating in the face of “issues both new and long postponed”. The newspaper expressed impatience with the meeting, seeing it as “yet another wasted opportunity”, where the “heads of government delayed in making decisions on matters which urgently required resolution”.

To add insult to injury, former chairman of the regional grouping and prime minister of Jamaica, Bruce Golding, attended the Grenada meeting and announced to the world the impotence of Caricom, given what he described as the “implementation deficit” eating away at its core. Justifiably, Mr Golding had the backing of powerful local private sector leaders, who in January of this year had effectively launched a public broadside against the 15-member state institution by questioning the value of Jamaica’s continued membership in the regional body.

So after 38 years, Caricom, it seems, is in danger of losing focus, if not efficacy. For whatever its present shortcomings, it was established, in pursuit of the goal of regional integration, to provide a forum for the region’s heads of government and technocrats to meet regularly for deliberation and decision-making on issues beneficial to all citizens of the region. It is the absence among the region’s heads of government (and regional multilateral institutions that coordinate them) of a sense of urgency around the need to discover, delineate and apply modalities for action which can maximise benefits within the region which has attracted mixed reviews from regional commentators and private sector interests alike.

One senses also that the current leaders of Caricom are more reactive than proactive in their focus in the face of stubborn global realities inside and outside the region. In truth, soaring (imported) fuel costs and the issue of subsidised energy costs in relation to the economy of Trinidad and Tobago vis-à-vis other regional economies, rising inflation, drugs and gun-trafficking, underperforming educational systems, the crisis facing the Caribbean manufacturing sector, the absence of a credible governance structure for Caricom and the proper functioning of the Caribbean Single Market, are but some of the objective challenges and forces demanding of Caricom an unequivocal decision to either take hold of them and direct them or live to suffer them. In other words, they demand urgent action over talk as the global economy lurches between imbalance and crisis.

Michael Manley had recommended as much when he attended the 10th Caricom Heads of Government meeting in Grenada. “I do not think we have much time to talk and we certainly have no time to doubt,” he was reported as saying. Informing this

recommendation on the part of the younger Manley was the realisation that the world economy then was becoming increasingly globalised and that Caricom’s strategy in going forward was to discover ways of developing its own internal strategies of production, resource control and survival, so that as a region we can be determinants of the global economy. But on reflection, and in relation to the Manley recommendation, Caricom has clearly registered more failures than successes over the years where it is necessary to rise to meet global challenges.

A great deal of this shortcoming has to do with the lack of new and strategic thinking coming from regional leaders and technocrats, especially in relation to the perception of Caribbean society and economy in the market-driven globalised world of the 21st century.

There is urgent need to make sense of the new global order and for wiser regional co-operation. A change of perception by the leaders of Caricom of the new global reality is urgently needed because such a reality is constantly throwing up new phenomena and theories that are resistant to the language, strategies and stratagems at hand. As`a collective leadership body, therefore, Caricom needs a new language and new ways of seeing the world or getting to see the world down the second decade into the 21st century. Admittedly, this is one of the greatest challenges of development anywhere in the world today.

In the final analysis, however, if Caricom is to avoid being labelled a perennial failure and an expensive embarrassment to regional sensibilities for progress, its leaders must bury self-doubt and embrace with urgency the agenda of concerns shaping the dynamics of contemporary Caribbean societies. Arguably, modalities of genuine co-operation such as the establishment of the Caribbean Court of Justice and the Caribbean Development Bank are solid regional achievements. But much more will be required to bring economic betterment, social integration and cultural assurance to the citizens of the region. For although Caricom governments are an inevitable part of the solution to our developmental problems, they nevertheless are not succeeding particularly well at the moment. This lack of success, however, is perhaps the most powerful argument for driving forward the slow process of trying to make Caricom work better.

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