The 30th Regular Meeting of the Caribbean Community (Caricom) Heads of Government convened in Georgetown earlier this month can hardly be said to have taken place under the most convivial of circumstances. Setting aside the fact that the regional movement continues to face persistent and justifiable criticism for its failure to implement a number of its own decisions, concerns have been raised about regional cohesiveness in tackling key foreign policy issues that inpact on the community as a whole. whether or not the Caricom Secretariat is sufficiently empowered and resourced to effectively pursue its mandate and how to position the Regional Negotiating Machinery it must ensure that it best serves the interests of the Community.
More recently, differences have arisen within Caricom over the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Europe while some member countries have expressed muted dissatisfaction over the effectivenwess of the two and a half-year old Caricom Single Market. (CSM), charging that some countries – Trinidad and Tobago has actually been named – have sought to maximize the volumes of their intra-regional exports while erecting barriers that serve to restrict imports.
Guyana, more particularly President Bharrat Jagdeo, has been at the centre of quite a few of these controversies, not least, the differences over the EPA and the concern that the RNM ought to be located directly within the Caricom Secretariat in order to have it serve the region more effectively.
More differences have arisen in recent weeks. Guyana, among other Caricom States including St. Vincent, has been at the centre of a discomfiting row with Barbados –which still seems far from over, regarding new Barbadian immigration regulations that have seen the uncerimonious eviction of several Guyanese and nationals of other Caricom countries residing on the island illegally. Here, President Jagdeo – rather than leave Guyana’s response to Barbados’ action entirely in the hands of his inexperienced Foreign Minister – choose to enjoin the affray personally and pointedly in what he saw as a necessary defence of “my people.”
Not only did the President cite Barbados for what he believed was the mistreatment of Guyanese during the eviction process, he also implied that the action by the Barbados government suggested that the 166 sq miles – 431 sq km square mile island with a population of (281,968 – July 08 est) whose economy depends largely on tourism is uneasy with the notion of free intra-regional movement of people, particularly in the prevailing global economic climate. When Barbados’ Prime Minister David Thompson refused to concede that his government had acted improperly in the process of evicting Guyanese and other Caricom nationals living on the island illegally, a major row between two of the founder members of the Community just ahead of the Georgetown Summit appeared a distinct possibility.
Well-traveled though he has been President Jagdeo is not generally regarded as a foreign policy president, though in recent years he appears to have been paying more focused attention to issues that connect Guyana to the region and to the international community. Three such issues come readily to mind. The first is his focus on climate change and its global implications, out of which has emerged his advocacy of financial compension to developing countries for the retention of standing forests; the second is his view that responses to the current global economic crisis ought to be attended by a renovation of the post war multilateral lending architecture – the Bretton Woods institutions – which, he contends, is inherently biased against growth and development in poor countries; the third is his insistence that Caricom member countries must act quickly to strengthen their agricultural sector in response to an unsustainable food import bill. The need is to shore up regional food security so as to enable Caricom to position irself to take economic advantage of a threatened global food crisis.
If the Georgetown Summit promised a forum at which Jagdeo could win further regional backing for this agenda, the aforementioned distractions clearly threatened to work to his disadvantage. Additionally, as host to the Summit and as the region’s ‘senior’ Head of Government – in terms of him enjoying the longest continuous period in office of any serving Caricom leader – he would presumably have been concerned with the role that the meeting could play in solidifying his personal credentials both as a regionalist and as a foreign policy President, the latter in the context of what has widely been seen as a considerably reduced focus by his administration on the role of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs as the ‘driver’ behind the ‘wheel’ of foreign policy execution.
Had the Georgetown Summit become too preoccupied with the various intra-regional distractions to focus on the Jagdeo agenda, that would have been a personal disappointment for Jagdeo. As it turned out he would have had good reason to be pleased with the outcome.
The row with Barbados over the immigration issue seemed the likeliest source of major distraction for the Summit. What may well have saved the day was the fact that President Jagdeo was not alone in his condemnation of Barbados’ action. He found support elsewhere, chiefly from Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Goulding who was unambiguously blunt in his criticism of Barbados’ action and from former Commonwealth Secretary General Sir Shridath Ramphal, who, though Guyanese, is sufficiently well-respected throughout the region to have had his words carry some measure of weight. In effect, while Prime Minister Thompson sought to make a spirited defence of his government’s position at a press conference here in Georgetown, the consensus of opinion supported the Jagdeo view that Barbados’ sovereign right notwithstanding, its treatment of the evicted persons was hardly consistent with the ideals of the Community, not least its goal of free movement of people across a single regional space.
Apart from the fact that the threatened distraction of a possible row over the Barbados issue blew over, quickly, the Summit itself may even have started a process of tackling the thorny issue of intra regional migration through a process of what the Heads have described as “managed migration.”
If Caricom watchers are understandably cynical over the regional movement’s propensity to neglect to give effect to decisions taken by Heads of Government, the final communiqué from the Georgetown Summit still remains, at least up until now, the only tool with which the outcomes of the Summit can be analysed; and there is much in the communique that President Jagdeo can cite to lay claim to having had a personally satisfying Summit.
In his own address at the start of the meeting he had sought to lay the basis for his subsequent inputs in the Summit deliberations by seeking to assert his own credentials as a regionalist. There was, he told the assembled Heads, “no alternative to integration,” urging, in the words of the communiqué, a preservation of “the popular faith in the cause of the integration movement” and pointing out that the goals of the Community were now “more relevant than in 1973 when the Treaty (of Chaguaramas) was signed.”
If these pronouncements were no less than appropriate in the circumstances, they amounted to a far from accidental focus on what Jagdeo clearly wished to be seen as his own administration’s commitment to Caricom and his personal regionaslist posture. Here, his obvious strategy was to establish a foundation through which he could secure the credentials with which to place his own personal imprint on the Summit and to secure regional endorsement of his agenda.
The outcomes of the deliberations as reflected in the final communiqué suggest that Jagdeo’s approach worked. This much is made clear in those sections of the communiqué that would have mattered most to him – seeking collective regional responses to the impact of the global economic and financial crisis on the region; placing greater regional emphasis on the agricultural sector and enjoing the global discourse on tackling the challenge of climate change.
Economic Development (The Glocal Economic and Financial Crisis)
The decision by the Conference to assign Jagdeo the headship of a Task Force “to facilitate mobilization of funds and present a core set of proposals” for the region’s response to the global financial and economic crisis has handed him lead responsibility for Caricom’s most pressing current assignment. The critical importance of the assignment aside, President Jagdeo will doubtless see his preferment as reflective of his colleagues’ recognition of his earlier efforts to place the particular problems of poorer countries arising out of the current crisis on the fromt burner of the international stage. His headship of the Task Force which, interestingly, has won him plaudits from his local political opposition, provides an opportunity for him to significantly strengthen his own credentials as a foreign policy president, while even a modest measure of success in securing international financing to help shore up the vulberable economies in the region could enhance his credentials as a Caricom man.
Agriculture and Food Policy
President Jagdeo will take particular satisfaction from the Summit’s outcome in this area. Up until the meeting of regional Heads, he had, on at least one occasion, publicly voiced his frustration over what he felt was a measure of regional indifference to his calls for more financial and technical resources to be allocated to agriculture in the respective member states. At Liliendaal, Heads not only “underscored the importance of agriculture for food and nutritional security and for the development of our economies,” but went further, issuing a special Declaration – the content of which bears an unmistakable Jagdeo imprimatur – citing The Jagdeo Initiative for its role in identfying :the further development of the agricultural sector” including “production and productivity, competitiveness and exports ……. as an important contributor to rural development, GDP, employment, export earnings and the overall sustainable development of the member states of the Caribbean Community.” Here, President Jagdeo won what up to that time had been a much sought after collective Caricom concession on the need for regional governments to increase “budgetary resources” for agriculture, and to see a ‘public/private sector partnership” as critical to the expansion of Caricom’s agricultural base; and while that still leaves him with what is by no means the easy taks of mobilizing that puvlic/private sector partnership and securing significant intra-regional and extra-regional investment in the Community’s agricultural sector, the Lilliendaal Declaration on Agriculture provides him with a strong regional mandate to ‘sell’ his Jagdeo Initiative more aggressively.
Climate Change and Development
While the Community’s position on the desirability of a positive regional response to the threat posed by climate change is already a matter of public record, the Lilliendaal Declaration on Climate Change and Development provides a deliberate acknowledgement of Jadgeo’s personal role in environmental diplomacy disourse. The Declaration alludes ro CaRICOM’s recognition “of the value and potential of standing forest, including pristine rainforest,” and affirms the region’s recognition “of its potential contribution to Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD)” Echoing virtually what is in essence the core of Jagdeo’s climate change treatsie the Declaration asserts that “forest conservation or avoided deforestation and sustainavle management of forests are important mitigation tools againsrt climate change in a post-2012 agreement.”
If President Jagdeo is unlikely to concede that much of his attention is focused on the legacy that he will leave behind at the end of his period in office, the signs that legavy is now one of his preoccupations are too pointed to ignore. His initiatives to present himself as his own Foreign Minister may have been taken at further cost to the substantive Foreign Ministry which, over time, has been systematically stripped of experience and capacity and denied the opportunity to effectively purse its rightful role in foreign policy execution. If this failing could ultimately prove costly to Guyana being effectively represented on the international stage – and here the issue of the highly specialized foreign policy pursuit of preserving Guyana’s territorial integrity comes quickly to mind – that matter probably belongs in a separate analysis. It is The Jagdeo Legacy that is the principal concern of this offering. The President, it appears, has timed his run well bear, his focus on the regional and global diplomatic stages coinciding with the emergence of issues that are as pressing for the international community as they are for the Caribbean Community.