UNITED CARIBBEAN APPROACH TO FTAA

“United we stand, divided we fall” motto of the State of Kentucky, USA. Had the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) effectively wooed Cuba, Santo Domingo and Haiti, say ten years ago, while at the same time establishing the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), the Community would have been in a stronger position today to negotiate favourable terms of entry to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, due to come into being in 2005. Instead, locked into the thinking of its colonial past, there had been stubborn resistance on the part of the initially, wholly English speaking CARICOM to accept the Spanish and French speaking countries as critically needed parts of the Caribbean whole. It was a sad carry over from the old rivalries of the European powers — Britain, France and Spain — which although they should not be doing so today, still unwittingly dominate our thinking. And, regrettably, although decreasingly, the thinking of the Spanish and French speaking Caribbean as well.

Several decades after the former West Indian colonies proudly hoisted their national flags and began singing their national anthems, a bit of the colonial resistance to closer association with non-English speaking territories remains. The latest objector, openly vocal, has been the Opposition United National Congress, which expressed reservations to closer association with Haiti, advanced recently by this country’s Administration. Three years ago, writing in The Caribbean’s Top 100 Companies 2000-2001 publication, I had cautioned: “Today.... years later, old suspicions born of rivalries between metropolitan powers — Spain, England, France, Portugal and Holland — which once owned several countries in the Caribbean, Central and South America, still linger on enough to hinder full trade relations and social exchanges between the territories, most of which are now independent. “Some of the stumbling blocks include those of language, what with people of the region speaking five different languages —English, Spanish, French, Dutch and Portuguese — the sea that separates many of the states, and imported cultural differences.”

All sides have been guilty of allowing the “imported cultural differences” to keep all too many people of the region from appreciating that the time is long overdue for optimum trading relations and closer association and, with the closer association, a united policy approach by an expanded and strengthened CARICOM, specifically, to the Free Trade Area of the Americas. Unless there is a carefully worked out common policy position, the Caribbean will continue to be exposed, to be vulnerable to whatever the FTAA holds, in the same way that fragmented as it is today it is a silly jest in a globalisation mind as represented by the World Trade Organisation’s rules and regulations. Neither Jamaica nor Trinidad and Tobago, nor for that matter Cuba, Haiti, Barbados, Guyana nor Santo Domingo can expect to negotiate terms individually in a meaningful manner with the Free Trade Area of the Americas. The Region has to be realistic. In the same way that indigenous industrialisation and agricultural development of Africa and India was consciously interrupted and rolled back by European powers, attempts at industrialisation and what have you by the Caribbean Region will be increasingly interrrupted by globalisation, unless there is a united Caribbean policy position.

We speak glibly of the industrialisation of Trinidad and Tobago, but apart from the herculean and farsighted policy thrust of CL Financial, this industrialisation is being done largely by “absentee landlords”. And in all too many instances their countries earn more revenues from investments here than does Trinidad and Tobago. But I have strayed. As I noted in earlier columns, Trinidad and Tobago and the rest of the Caribbean will be swamped by cheaply produced imports of United States companies, whether they operate in the USA or in Mexico or what have you. This will be done from early into the establishment of the Free Trade Area of the Americas, unless a Caribbean economic bloc of 20 million and more people can be created, and insist that for a determined number of years, the Region must be allowed to maintain reasonable tariff structures. The economies of the less developed CARICOM countries will slide into the mire “of a new dark age” without protective mechanisms. Should this take place there will be considerable loss of jobs, particularly in the Eastern Caribbean, when, flooded by American goods, the citizens of these island states decide it is cheaper to import them than either seek to produce them themselves or import them from other Caribbean lands.

This will pose a serious threat to small manufacturers in Trinidad and Tobago, the negative impact of which should not be dismissed. The CARICOM market represents Trinidad and Tobago’s second largest export market after that of the United States. The loss of the CARICOM market will hold frightening consequences for this country, leading as it surely will to an immediate loss of jobs, a loss of revenue, and a further dwindling of employment opportunities triggered by less money being turned around within the economy. Another attempt will be made to acquire the cement company, Trinidad Cement Limited, and should this succeed and, heaven forbid, cement production in companies owned by TCL be declared irrelevant to the needs of the acquiring company.