PETER Laurie, a former respected diplomat and top public servant of Barbados, has considered it worthwhile to challenge “visionary entrepreneurs” of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) to engage in pan-Caribbean investment to help move forward the regional economic integration process, even as governments appear stuck on a ‘pause’ mode over the CSME.

Now in retirement, but quite active in writing and discussing pertinent issues on national and regional developments, Laurie used his fortnightly column in last week’s Sunday Sun of the Nation Publishing Company to urge the region’s entrepreneurs to partner, in co-operation with the Caribbean diaspora, for a new era in pan-Caribbean investment.

A former long-serving permanent secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and quite well known to leaders of the region’s public and private sectors, Laurie feels that perhaps the politicians have taken regional integration as far as they can by providing the legal framework, and now is the time for “visionary entrepreneurs to move the process forward”.

Conscious that he was in effect revisiting an old theme, Laurie apologetically moved into his discourse by first declaring: “Okay, I’ve beaten this drum before.”

Well, as far as this columnist is concerned — and I think I can include others who often passionately write in the Jamaica Observer on the pluses and minuses of Caricom, while remaining committed to regional integration — Peter Laurie and the likes of him should keep “beating drums” to sustain hope, against the odds, for realisation of the long-promised seamless regional economy for “One People, One Caribbean Community”.

Enlightened entrepreneurs of this region should not be allowed to fall victim to those whose lack of vision and commitment have expediently pressed the “pause” button on vital areas of the CSME — including free intra-regional movement of skilled community nationals. Their own domestic regulatory mechanisms and ad hoc policies often make such a mockery of the spirit and letter of the Revised Caricom Treaty.

Commending today’s new Caribbean entrepreneurs for increasingly thinking beyond “the traditional Caribbean ways of making money”, as well as “thinking beyond national boundaries”, Laurie pointed to current advantages of, for example, the digital electronic revolution of the past two decades and how they could, in partnership with foreign capital, undertake massive pan-Caribbean development projects.

Transport and tourism

Not surprisingly, he identified among such projects regional air and sea transportation (without bothering to even allude to current problems of regional carriers like Caribbean Airlines, with which Air Jamaica has merged, and of course, the absence of anything that could bear the name of even an intra-regional ferry service).

He also referenced the vital cruise industry for which the Caribbean is the dominant destination for the international players in this sector, and urged regional/extra-regional partnerships in the tourism sector to embrace various projects.

Like, for instance, a chain of state-of-the-art luxury casinos as well as the creation of an “environmentally sensitive eco-hotel complex with an international airstrip at Guyana’s Kaieteur Falls (long reputed to be one of the wonders of the world).

Those entrepreneurs would be conscious of the gravity of the current “Eurozone crisis” for regions like the Caribbean, and seized with the reality that there can be no serious alternative to making “Caricom work” for the citizens and partners of our “Caribbean home”.

They should also be aware why they should not be distracted by, for instance, the raw cynicism displayed against the Caribbean Community in an opinion piece in The Economist this past week headlined ‘Half a Century of Small Islands with Big Egos’.

Rather, they and their public sector allies (yes, there are such allies among member governments of Caricom) should become active in reviving interest in, for example, the once much-touted Caribbean Business Council (CBC) about which so little of significance is being heard, but which is a potentially critical source for needed collective private sector leadership.

SG LaRocque

Much to his credit, Caricom Secretary General Erwin LaRocque has been vigorously referencing the need for the CBC to get off the drawing board in interactions with business leaders across the community in an apparent new effort to beat back pessimism over the future of the regional integration movement.

The latest effort was his meeting last month in Port-of-Spain with the Trinidad and Tobago Coalition of Service Industries. “It is becoming more and more evident,” he told the representatives of business and government, “that the time is now for more structured interface between the regional public and private sectors and, in doing so, to include other stakeholders, such as the labour movement…”

LaRocque recalled that it was with such a regional approach in mind that the Caribbean Business Council was conceived as an umbrella body to advance the interest of both the private sector and the goals of Caricom.

The question of interest now is: “Who will take the initiative to arrange for a tripartite meeting of representatives of the private sector (Caribbean Association of Industry and Commerce; regional manufacturers?); Caribbean Congress of Labour (currently rather inactive) or the Caricom Secretariat in order to move the process for inauguration of the CBC?

Moving away from the ‘pause’ mode decision by the political directorate to inspiring enthusiasm for a people-oriented Caricom is clearly more than a challenge for governments.

Who then, among the region’s best known “visionary entrepreneurs” will stand up to be counted to lead the march on the way forward for a new era in pan-Caribbean economic development with governments being willing, for a start, to facilitate by dismantling layers of burdensome bureaucratic impediments?