PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad (CMC) — St Lucia Prime Minister Dr Kenny Anthony says the Caribbean is, and has for too long, been stalled at a crossroads of indecision and warned regional countries are in danger of becoming anachronistic and out of step with the rest of the world.

“Several indicators suggest that we have reached a point in our evolution as countries where the old assumptions are out of sync with reality. They may not be entirely degraded, but they have passed their sell-by date,” Anthony said, as he delivered a lecture at the St Augustine campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) on Tuesday night.

Anthony, the third Caribbean Community (Caricom) leader to deliver an address under the UWI’s “Distinguished Open Lecture” as part of its Caricom Leaders Lecture Series, spoke on the topic “Delivered or Denied: Integration’s Cost and Benefit”.

Prime Minister Anthony said he was not alone in his assumption that the Caribbean is “literally out of time and out of step with the rest of the world”, noting that a quick overview of economic performance will confirm that half a century after independence, “we are still engaged in major battles against the region’s worst enemies: poverty, ignorance, crime, disease and debt”.

“We do not lay this crisis at the feet of any one institution nor will it profit us to pretend that there is any single cause. On the contrary, where we are today is the result of several factors that have conspired to temper both our resilience and our resolve.”

Anthony said that at the root of the region’s dilemma is the demise of its commodity sectors which he said were the bedrock of the post-independence economies and which were the main engines of employment, savings, investment and growth.

“Nor has the transition to service-based economies, led primarily by tourism, been much of a palliative. Today, within Caricom, those economies with tourism as their lead sectors are faring worse than those with strong commodity sectors. Certainly, we are not seeing much growth potential in traditional agriculture, which for many years was ‘king’.”

The St Lucia Prime Minister said that virtually all the region’s primary exports have taken a beating on the open market, changing the very fabric of Caribbean countries and altering their ability to finance the very change needed then and still need now.

“While it is true that scale of production and domestic market size will always generate dis-economies, our ability to overcome both these hurdles should have improved in a more open and globalised economy.

“Certainly, access to technology, ease of market entry, and the emergence of new non-traditional markets should have encouraged us to re-position. Our hesitation to do so with our traditional commodity sector must then have something to do with how we have managed and continue to manage our regional production frontiers,” said Anthony.

He said in the case of banana producing countries, where the industry was once a million-dollar a week enterprise, “we failed to address in time and in entirety, the very obvious open market challenges we knew were coming.

“Instead, we preferred to hope that special and exceptional arrangements would be made for us in the wake of collapsing market protection. Indeed, we created an elaborate, and some say expensive regional negotiating machinery mandated to make it so.”

Anthony said that “so convinced were we that inherent fragility would render us unable to cope, we hoped that additional aid, instead of open trade, would have helped us transition successfully.

“In hindsight, we must ask ourselves why we did not learn from our competitors, and expand our production frontiers beyond our own geographic limits. Instead, we shrank our imaginations and remained insular. We declined to learn the bitter lessons of our own history.”

He said the region also failed to become owners of a global industry given the decades of industry knowledge growing bananas anywhere in the world where land, climate and other critical factors of production coincided.

He said that while the global financial crisis dashed many hopes of sustainable prosperity in a post- banana world, it is also possible that the very things we have not addressed will continue to plague us.

“That is the fragility within our economies that have nothing to do with size: those vulnerabilities that are within our grasp to address, and which we must address regardless of the primary economic activities we choose to pursue now or in the future,” said Anthony.

Prime Minister Anthony said that the dilemma is quite possibly one of cause and effect.

“Put alternatively, building more robust economies based on access to markets, capital, technology, information, knowledge and skills is something we need to do regardless of what development sectors are in the lead, or offer comparative advantage. This is not where we are failing. This is why we are failing,” he told his audience.

He said similarly, fiscal prudence, world-class education, good governance, functional justice systems, and strong democratic institutions are critical to economic growth, and could be well within the reach of the Caribbean “if we would make them the budgetary priorities they should be.

“This we must do to protect and expand economic turf. If we do desist, we can hardly blame Caricom or any single market for our deficiency in that regard. Our economists need to rethink our political economy,” he warned.

Prime Minister Anthony said that there is also quite possibly a similar danger of negative self-perception and equity facing the region’s Caribbean tourism sector.

“While we accept that the sector had to be seeded with high foreign capital, we ought to be concerned that it continues to be characterised by high levels of external ownership.”