Editorial | When CARICOM meets

Given the potentially existential stresses being faced by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), it is a strategic and tactical lapse by regional leaders that they have not brought forward the first of their regular bi-annual summits.

So this year’s session will be held in St Kitts and Nevis on February 24-27, around the same period that the meetings are normally held. However, the four-day schedule should afford the leaders time to work through a likely substantial agenda, assuming that they do not become stuck on the first item, or the conference does not collapse in disarray.

The fact, though, is that this summit is essentially a single-issue affair of two related components: America’s military actions in the southern Caribbean Sea, with the aim of regime change in Venezuela; and Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s ridiculing of CARICOM’s members that have expressed reticence or unease over the US’s behaviour. Ms Persad-Bissessar has gone as far as branding CARICOM an unreliable partner for her country.

While economic realities might cause a recalibration of postures and soften the rhetoric that has flown across the Caribbean over the issue, six weeks is a long time until the leaders assemble face-to-face to thrash out their differences and arrive at a compromise with which all sides can live. In that time geopolitical forces and provocateurs keen on undermining the regional integration movement could cause much havoc.

In that context, The Gleaner welcomes and endorses the reminder by Terrance Drew, CARICOM’s new chairman, and the meeting’s host, that the community’s strength is as a collective and of the need to manage differences with care and mutual respect, with an understanding that, in the final analysis, the Caribbean can look to no one to save it but itself.

“CARICOM was never conceived as a space free of disagreement,” Dr Drew said in a New Year’s statement. “It was created as a forum where differences could be addressed constructively, internally, and with the shared understanding that our collective strength is greater than any single issue before us.”

He added: “This reality does not call for isolation, but for stronger coordination, clearer purpose, and deeper solidarity. It requires us to speak louder, speak with conviction, speak with one voice, where our shared interests are concerned, and to act with strategic maturity on the global stage.”

DISCOMFITED

CARICOM – a regional single market and functional cooperation body that also coordinates foreign policy – has been discomfited by the return of Donald Trump to the US presidency and his administration’s deliberate disruption of global trade norms and the international institutions that small countries, such as those in the Caribbean, in the past looked to for some level of protection.

Mr Trump’s agenda was brought closer to CARICOM when he sent an American naval armada to the south Caribbean Sea to lethally attack alleged drug-smuggling vessels, which legal experts have called extrajudicial killings and a breach of international law. In fact, as the US administration eventually confirmed, the military action is aimed at ousting Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan president, who Washington brands as illegitimate and a drug smuggler.

When the US military blew up the first alleged drug-smuggling vessel, Ms Persad-Bissessar urged the Americans to “kill them all violently”, then decried CARICOM’s reassertion of its policy of the Caribbean be maintained as a zone of peace.

She has also allowed the Americans to set up a radar-tracking system in Tobago to support their military operations. And when Washington placed visa restrictions on Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica, ostensibly over Washington’s dissatisfaction with how they run their citizenship for investment programme, Ms Persad-Bissessar’s was essentially implying that it served them right for “bad-mouthing” the US and allegedly supporting Mr Maduro. She also disassociated her government from CARICOM’s call for talks with the two countries, and declared the community “not a reliable partner at this time”.

CALLS FOR BOYCOTT

In St John’s, the Antigua and Barbuda capital, there have been calls for a CARICOM boycott of Trinidadian exports to the region, which, at around US$1.2 billion, accounts for around 16 per cent of its global exports, and a substantial portion of Port of Spain’s non-oil and non-mineral exports. Trinidad and Tobago imports US$150 million from its regional partners.

These suggestions are at a time when the international rating agencies, Standard & Poor’s and Moody’s, have adjusted their outlook for Trinidad and Tobago from stable to negative, the country’s natural gas production has fallen, and businesses face foreign exchange shortages. Obviously, a decline in Trinidadian exports to CARICOM would be bad for its economy. Significantly, an important basis for the competitiveness of Trinidadian manufactures to the region is CARICOM’s common external tariff, which is applied to imports from outside the community.

But the resulting tensions, if the decline was the result of an active boycott, would seriously undermine CARICOM, likely leading to an extended term of atrophy, if not its death.

Which is why we back Dr Drew’s call for regional dialogue – knock-down, clawing fights even – if they take place at the leaders’ private caucus, from which they emerge with consensus positions that fit the region’s agenda, rather than ones that have been set for it.