CSME reality check

While the news from Foreign Affairs Minister, Knowlson Gift, that this country expects to receive written pedges of support for its bid to have the headquarters of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) sited here is welcome, nonetheless it is critical that the Caribbean Single Market and Economy be established before the FTAA becomes a reality. The Caribbean Community of Nations (CARICOM) must enter the FTAA as a single economic bloc, allowing, as Ambassador Extraordinaire Jerry Narace has pointed out, for the free movement of goods, capital and people throughout the region. Not only will CARICOM economies be strengthened further, but they will be better positioned to avoid being swamped by American goods produced either in the United States or in Mexico by US companies under the umbrella of the three-nation North American Free Trade Area NAFTA — US, Mexico and Canada. This, with the added incentive of cheap Mexican labour.

But in the same way that the US, Canada and Mexico will be better positioned as the NAFTA bloc operating within the proposed FTAA, so will a CSME-flavoured CARICOM. Unfortu-nately, some of the region’s politicians continue to frustrate the setting up of the CSME through their blocking of the establishment of the Caribbean Court of Justice, a prerequisite to creating the CSME. In Trinidad and Tobago, for example, the Opposition United National Congress, perhaps still clinging to the long discredited colonial notion that only the British Privy Council could properly dispense justice, has refrained from supporting the Government’s move to have the CCJ replace the Privy Council as the final Court of Appeal. Meanwhile, although there is the free movement of capital throughout CARICOM, facilitated through the initiative of regional entrepreneurs and stock exchanges in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados, there are still fetters on the free movement of people and goods.

A CCJ and with it the CSME will allow, inter alia, for the removal of clearly ludicrous passport requirements for travel of CARICOM nationals within CARICOM and tariff and other barriers on CARICOM originating goods. The region’s politicians should redefine their roles and see themselves as facilitators of, rather than obstacles to the free movement of goods and people and to a limited extent capital. This will promote a greater flow of CARICOM produced goods within the region and the effective lowering of their landed cost, and translate in the process into increased production and with it the creation of additional jobs. But all of this should be effected before the finalising of and our entry into the FTAA. Failure will mean that CARICOM would have, figuratively speaking, fashioned whips for its own economic flogging.