A CARICOM rod of correction

During a journalism workshop in an OECS country about 20 years ago, we were doing a word association exercise. Word: “Wesley.” Response: “Seafood.” Word: “Beach.” Response: “Reduit.” Word: “Trinis.” Response: “Arrogance.”

Sometime before that came an exercise in another island to assess knowledge and acceptance of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME). There was a roomful of people with small and medium businesses.

“Can you imagine?” one participant interjected, (because of this CARICOM business) “every cent of my retirement money is now in a bank owned by Trinidadians.” Supportive groans, side-chatter, and applause were followed by a call to order.

I once called a PR guy here, following a journalism exercise in Suriname to tell him that one of the biggest signs in Paramaribo contained the logo of his T&T bank, and it was stinging the eyes of Surinamese people who thought they were holding the sticky end of a CARICOM stick and it was now being driven into their heart.

By then, one of our soft drink manufacturers had significantly and painfully eaten into the market of a longstanding local producer. There was a growing view that the hospitality of the people of this mainland country was being mistaken for some kind of weakness. A more culturally sensitive touch was clearly required.

“I think that sign should be bigger,” was the PR guy’s response. Giggle, giggle.

North, south and east of here, there has been a view (substantiated by trade and economic imbalances) that T&T has been extracting more from CARICOM arrangements than we have been investing politically in the process.

However, uninformed public opinion here has been that regionalism has done nothing to justify the costs and time devoted to what, some hold, is a remote fantasy hinged on an expired regional paradigm.

This column has repeatedly cited the empirical bases for the more rigorous embrace of the Caribbean social, economic, and cultural space. There are serious grounds to frame a survival project.

Recent Caribbean Private Sector Organisation (CPSO) concerns about the “local content” law in Guyana are rooted in such a summation and should not be ignored or passed to some vaguely mandated “committee.”

President Irfaan Ali’s countervailing diagnosis however asserts: “Do so, don’t like so.”

So, as we speak, forces are massing in Georgetown against Port of Spain and Caroni and San Fernando and Couva and Pt Fortin.

The sad part is I have heard people, who have clearly not been paying attention, actually wonder why.

Surely, “local content” within the meaning and spirit of a single social and economic space, embraces a much wider horizon than domestic territory.

The brutal truth is, even as some Guyanese politicians are mistaken about the implications of a single economic space on “local content”, Port of Spain, Caroni, San Fernando, Couva and Pt Fortin have over the years been busily fine-tuning their machinations to constrict, not expand, entrepreneurial boundaries.

Given today’s realities and demands, can you imagine the psychic transformation that would now render them capable of claiming/yielding common space with Kingston, Castries, Georgetown, and Paramaribo?

It has not been much different in St John’s or Bridgetown, but we in T&T need to busy ourselves with resolving the circumstances that have led us to believe we are capable of subsisting as two islands unto ourselves.

We have been working hard to tailor our institutions accordingly. CARICOM nationals have had to join inordinately long queues to regularise their status here. Up to a few years ago, Skilled Nationals applications languished for months and months on a government minister’s desk.

The immigration default is to shut out and deny without regard for a binding Treaty (of Chaguaramas), domestic legislation and policy (a Skilled CARICOM Nationals regime among others), and the authority of the Caribbean Court of Justice which, in my view, has been underutilised to challenge numerous injustices against regional nationals here.

Notwithstanding a record spanning 17 years, there remain people in law, politics, business, and public affairs, who still repeat the nonsense that “Trinidad and Tobago is not in the CCJ.”

As a consequence of all of the above, particularly in now buoyant Georgetown, “local content” policy is perceived of as a mechanism not only to assure national benefits from an emerging, lucrative source of economic salvation, but as a rod of correction against those of us not previously minded to honour regional commitments in spirit, in practice, and at law.