Despite a warning by former Jamaican Prime Minister PJ Patterson that they needed to do something urgently about implementing decision, Caricom Heads meeting in Georgetown last week are still to take a concrete decision
The communiqué issued late Saturday night contained just one sentence on governance. It said, “Heads of Government reviewed the governance arrangements of the Community and expect to conclude their considerations on the basis of proposals to be advanced by the Secretary-General and the Task Force on Governance”.
Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding had told reporters on Friday that some “interesting ideas” had been discussed with regards to an implementation agency for decision-making in Caricom. He had said that he hoped that arising out of these ideas a platform would have been constructed on which the Heads might be able to “finally address this enormous difficulty of governance”. He added that he hoped that it gained traction.
He noted that if Caricom was not going in the direction of a political union “…then the challenge is to find a mechanism that works because right now where the void I think exists, is that the authority resides in (the Heads”. It doesn’t seem from the communiqué that this discussion went as far as had been hoped for by Golding.
At Thursday’s opening of the 30th summit of Caricom heads at the National Cultural Centre, Patterson had said that the community’s credibility had been wounded by the failure to implement solemn declarations year after year.
He said “the litmus test for effective governance is not measured by the decisions taken when heads meet, it is whether action follows…. The greatest threat to the credibility of Caricom lies clearly in the failure to implement solemn declarations and decisions made conference after conference”, Patterson declared, adding that he himself could not be absolved of this flaw.
Further, he stated that “mature regionalism will remain a pipe-dream unless authority is vested in an executive mechanism which is charged with full time responsibility for ensuring the implementation within a specified time frame of the critical decisions taken by Heads and other designated organs of the Community. For how much longer can a final decision be postponed on upgrading the institutional machinery if the community is not to become comatose?”
This argument goes all the way back to the 1992 report of the West Indian Commission chaired by Sir Shridath Ramphal – who was in the audience at the time that Patterson spoke – where an executive mechanism was recommended.
It was later taken up again the Rose Hall Declaration of the same date of last week’s conference six years ago but has not moved much since then. The Rose Hall Declaration had envisaged “The establishment of a CARICOM Commission or other executive mechanism, whose purpose will be to facilitate the deepening of regional Integration… The Commission’s function will be to exercise full-time executive responsibility for furthering implementation of Community decisions in such areas as well as to initiate proposals for Community action in any such area.”
Meanwhile, Saturday’s communiqué signalled the urgent need for the establishment of an “effective regional regime of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures”. The Heads mandated the committee on trade and economic development (COTED) to advise on arrangements for a Caribbean Agricultural Health and Food Safety Agency.
The Heads further agreed that “member states should extend to intra-regional imports of new food products treatment no less favourable than that extended to extra-regional imports of new food products, including risk assessments inspections”.
Jamaica had raised this as a serious point of concern noting that meat patties were having great difficulty entering the Trinidad market even though Kingston’s standards organization had been accepted by the European Union resulting in the grouping no longer having to inspect the island’s facilities.
“They have assessed them and they accept their work and yet our own Caricom partners won’t accept the certification from our standards organization”, Golding lamented.
