Caricom Must Take More Pragmatic Approach To Regional Integration

by Amanda Banks, Tax-News.com, London

06 July 2004

If the Caribbean Single Market and Economy is to function adequately, then member states of Caricom may have to take a more pragmatic approach to the process of regional integration, the Prime Minster of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves believes.

Speaking last month at the 24th Annual Caribbean Insurance Conference staged in the US Virgin Islands, Mr Gonsalves told delegates that although the case for Caribbean integration is unanswerably strong, “the absence of integration certainly will not occasion apocalypse, damnation, perdition or a permanent state of perish."

On the other hand, a more fragmented approach to regional issues would be “far more problematic”, especially in the light of the FTAA negotiations and the general process of globalisation taking place in the business environment, he stated.

The Prime Minster suggested that the member states of Caricom may need to be prepared to cede a degree of political power to a central decision-making institution in a similar fashion to the way in which the European Union operates.

“To be ready for the single economy is more profoundly complex for independent nation-states, which are reluctant to go beyond the notion of CARICOM as a community of sovereign states," Mr Gonsalves observed.

"Some countries get so bogged down in the realities of their day-to-day existence that the regional agenda gets side-tracked save and except for the most routine areas of functional cooperation," he added.

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