Integration and the Caricom four

Two weeks from now (October 1), what is widely described as the “full free movement”, on a reciprocal basis, of Caricom nationals from Barbados, Belize, Dominica, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) will be in place.

The provision is described in the communiqué emerging from the 49^th Heads of Government Conference hosted in Jamaica last July. A reminder of this was sent to the press on Monday.

The Summit statement describes what is now expected from these countries under the relatively new Caricom Protocol on Enhanced Cooperation - the application of which, incidentally and in the words of the communiqué, requires authorisation by the full body.

Under this measure, Caricom heads “can allow groups of at least three Member States to seek to advance integration among themselves where the Conference (of Heads) agrees that the targeted objectives cannot be attained within a reasonable period by the Community as a whole.”

These four countries will thus now, and among themselves, “grant their nationals the right to enter, leave and re-enter, move freely, reside, work and remain indefinitely in the receiving Member State without the need for a work or residency permit.

“Their nationals will also be able to access emergency and primary health care, and public primary and secondary education, within the means of the receiving Member State.”

This suggests that the remaining eight CSME countries will, for the moment, reside outside the embrace of this measure and continue to benefit solely from the current, prescribed categories of “skilled national” provisions.

It had always been the stated aspiration that all of us would have travelled the full route. This is minus The Bahamas, Haiti, and Montserrat – all for different reasons.

Yet, close followers always knew that this active exploration of possibilities would have presented peculiar challenges to some countries in which unfettered political and wider public resolve had never really been enthusiastically exhibited, especially over recent years. T&T has been one of these.

Given that public opinion has been routinely subject to political ambivalence on this question, there exists a situation in which awareness of benefits and challenges remains in chronic deficit.

It has not helped that neither the Caricom Secretariat nor our respective governments have viewed statistics and data as absolutely necessary to guide both public policy and opinion.

For example, there is a view in T&T (whenever the question arises about the use value of Caricom) that this country is subject to net financial and human resource losses (and not gains) when it comes to the operation of the Single Market – however flawed and frequently misunderstood.

Though net estimates of intra-regional migrant flows on account of Single Market provisions are incomprehensively difficult to harvest (I cannot remember the last update from the Secretariat or from T&T), there is far less vagueness on the balance of trade surplus (TT$8.5 billion in 2022), together with the work of 27 institutions of Caricom.

The Caricom Private Sector Organisation (CPSO) has pledged research and advocacy resources on the issues of trade and free movement. But it is the responsibility of individual states to get their act together on the question of timely, reliable data.

The ”Caricom is a waste of time” argument is a long-established function of unforgiveable ignorance, and the basis for an argument that there is more to be gained than lost through disengagement and recalibrated loyalties.

Even so, this is typically characterised by cherry-picking retention of indispensable institutional relationships in the areas of law, business, education, health, food, and other key areas of development. This is important as it is now abundantly clear that nobody else will see about these things on our behalf.

Former Caricom Assistant Secretary-General Trade and Economic Integration, Joseph Cox (now leading the Caribbean Business Review) recently engaged Caricom Deputy Secretary-General Dr Armstrong Alexis in an enlightening conversation on these and other matters.

The encounter generated the interest to stimulate today’s missive on this page. But it also raised questions regarding Caricom’s “evolving mandate” (Alexis’ formulation) and an unravelling of the regional tapestry from the untidy underside.

In the process, political investment in excavating real value from limited, and in some cases diminishing, national wealth appears in decline. Four from among us have chosen to dig deeper. Who’s next? We already, disappointingly, know who won’t be.