In 1989, CARICOM Heads of Government issued the Grand Anse Declaration, which established the West Indian Commission, an independent body with a mandate to come up with recommendations to advance the goals of the Treaty of Chaguaramas, CARICOM’s founding document. Between 1990 and 1992, the Commission held public consultations across the Caribbean and its diasporas. I remember attending one of the open meetings in Barbados, seeing women and men lined up at the microphones awaiting their turn to be heard, the gathering spilling over into the lit yard outside, and feeling that night that I was not a Guyanese in Barbados, but part of a wider Caribbean community, and witness to something historic.
The publication, in 1992, of Time for Action: The Report of the West Indian Commission, grapples in several places with the challenge of nurturing a spirit of regional unity and engagement that finds institutional expression in CARICOM while not being confined to it. It makes for timely reading against the backdrop of the public statement released last week expressing the concerns of Caribbean citizens over the recent Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) initialled between Cariforum countries and the European community, a statement whose signatories include two of the members of the 1992 Commission, Vaughan Lewis and Rex Nettleford.
One could perhaps argue that the EPA reflects one of the things that the Commission called for, namely a pooling of expertise and resources to negotiate in external arenas and in the mutual interests of member states. But to what end? Time for Action makes the bottom line, the non-negotiable point of departure, clear: “The basis of our work has been to listen to the people. The kernel of what they have reported is that their lives will be better if steps are taken to hasten integration.”
There are an increasing number of dissenting voices that believe that the EPA is a step that will weaken, not consolidate, regional unity, and that it is Caribbean people who will be the ultimate losers. The public statement released last week does not require that we take at face value the word of those who have expressed concern with or opposition to the EPA. But neither should we unquestioningly accept the decision-makers’ ‘done deal’ reports that instruct us to celebrate. These are complex and contentious issues, and what is required is informed and accessible public discussions of the implications of the EPA for our economies and for the livelihoods of our peoples.
If the agreement is in the best interests of the Caribbean, as some would have us believe, then presumably it will withstand the test of public scrutiny prior to the official signing in two months time. One wonders, then, why there is such silence on this issue. Are we to conclude that Caribbean people do not need to know the details, that they will not understand, that participation is too time-consuming and expensive?
Or that if consultations with civil society occur, they shall be with “stakeholders,” a term that all too often includes select interest groups at the expense of genuine engagement with the majority of Caribbean people? Surely it cannot be such a hugely subversive move to call for the democratisation of knowledge in relation to the EPA, described by one economist as the single most important agreement that CARICOM states have entered into since independence. Who is accountable, and to whom?
The lesson we have learned, the hard way, is that opportunities must be found to meaningfully remedy this participatory deficit in the future.
In its editorial of Friday January 25, the Stabroek News alerted its readers to public hearings taking place this week in Washington under the auspices of the US International Trade Commission, in relation to the expiration of the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act (CBTPA) in September 2008. And on Wednesday January 23rd, the Trinidad and Tobago Express reported, based on comments from the senior trade commissioner at the Canadian High Commission, that the first full round of negotiations on a comprehensive Canada/CARICOM Free Trade Agreement is scheduled to get underway next month, even though the existing arrangement between the region and Canada (CARIBCAN) does not expire until 2011.
On the website of the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery, there is an entry on the February schedule for a “Canada-CARICOM trade negotiating encounter” (it says proposal to be confirmed). The future is closer than we think. We must ensure that there is no repeat performance of the EPA process, and that, as a letter writer to this newspaper pointed out, “citizens’ engagement is utilized to formulate positions, responses and encourage policy coherence”. A regional mandate means the participation and endorsement of Caribbean peoples, “on matters of concern to the vitality of CARICOM as a community”.
Those may have been the words of the West Indian Commission, but they reflected the sentiments widely expressed at the public hearings in 1992. Fifteen years later, it is indeed Time for Action.
For more information on the EPA, and to add your name to the list of signatories, visit www.normangirvan.info
