Integration High on Caricom Summit
Tuesday July 05 2011 | 09:52 AM

As St. Kitts prepares to host the July 1-4 Thirty Second Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community, incoming Chairman Hon. Dr. Denzil Douglas says regional integration is high on the Summit’s agenda.

St. Kitts-Nevis Prime Minister DR. Douglas says as Caricom Chair he will pursue this agenda at the meeting to ensure that there is a firm recommitment of the Caribbean Community towards implementing the Caricom Single Market Economy (CSME).

“You would have remembered that over the last few months there have been several challenging pieces of information that we have received. We’ve heard countries basically make reference to the fact that maybe the CSME for example is not working. We’ve had people seriously question the functioning of the Caribbean Court of Justice and whether or not Community members would advance to become members of the court even though we are all financing the upkeep of the court,” he said. “I think the recommitment of the Heads to pursue the integration movement is going to be critically important.”

The Caricom Heads went into retreat in Guyana a few weeks ago to examine where they were going with Caricom and what the initial principles and commitments were that had been established by their predecessors.

“Is it that these intellectuals and charismatic leaders of yesteryear were too ambitious with regard the agenda that they set for the integration movement? We came away after serious examination that the principles on which the integration movement was founded are sound. The leaders of yesterday, we believe, did the right thing in identifying the specific paths that the integration movement would take.”

He said the group had also concluded that the realities of the times and difficulties that Caricom members were experiencing as individual countries due to the global recession and resultant serious socio-economic fallout, was reason for them to slow the integration process down.

“Maybe we need to slow down the ace at which the movement will continue. We’ve taken the view that the achievement if the Caricom Single Economy would be placed on hold. We will continue to move forward in achieving the Caribbean Community towards implementing the Caricom Single Market.”

One of the main challenges of the CSM implementation was the free movement of people, Dr. Douglas reminded. He said because of the social challenges that each member territory is facing at this time, members are of the view that maybe the different category of workers that were approved was too ambitious.

“So we need to probably look at those again, reflect awhile, slow it down because the social infrastructure that we have in our various member territories may not be able to sustain a continuous flow of movement of labor from one territory that may be having it difficult to another territory that is perceived as having it better, because the social infrastructure is not in place to sustain them,” he informed.

Dr. Douglas emphasized that much more had been achieved, in terms of functional cooperation in areas such as health care and education, than persons in the Caribbean have recognized.