Three ma­jor rec­om­men­da­tions of an of­fi­cial of the Shri­dath Ram­phal Cen­tre (SRC), which is a think tank to in­form Cari­com’s pro­duc­tion, trade and in­ter­na­tion­al poli­cies for the ad­vance­ment of the trad­ing group, re­main un­achieved over the last 25-plus years.

SRC Ju­nior Re­search Fel­low Ali­cia Nichols, in an analy­sis of the chal­lenges ahead for the Cari­com in­te­gra­tion move­ment —giv­en the evolv­ing world be­ing re­or­gan­ised by US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump and the un­cer­tain­ty of that—has put for­ward three ma­jor ar­eas of fo­cus for the 15-mem­ber re­gion­al group­ing.

One is the con­tin­ued en­gage­ment of Cari­com with US law­mak­ers and the Caribbean Di­as­po­ra to re­tain cur­rent trade pref­er­ences and hav­ing a uni­fied voice on all in­ter­na­tion­al mat­ters of in­ter­est to the re­gion. The oth­er is that Cari­com must mean­ing­ful­ly seek to ex­pand the re­gion’s trade re­la­tions with Eu­rope, South Amer­i­ca, Africa and Asia. Fi­nal­ly, and per­haps most im­por­tant, is for Cari­com mem­ber states to ex­pand and in­te­grate trade be­tween and amongst mem­ber states.

Not one of these pro­pos­als is a new one and have been ar­tic­u­lat­ed time and again in stud­ies, pro­pos­als and pro­grammes for in­te­gra­tion go­ing back to the 1989 De­c­la­ra­tion in Grena­da of the Cari­com Sin­gle Mar­ket and Econ­o­my (CSME).

That tells us that there is ei­ther no new think­ing by the trade ex­perts, or that the chal­lenges re­main un­con­quered by Caribbean ex­porters and im­porters, re­tard­ed fur­ther by the lack of de­fin­i­tive ac­tion by gov­ern­ments. If the lat­ter is so, our lead­ers, busi­ness and pro­duc­tion sec­tors have not ad­vanced the ef­fort over the last two decades-plus to at­tain the ob­jec­tive of in­te­grat­ing our hu­man and phys­i­cal re­sources to in­ter­act with the rest of the world.

To set­tle on the first pos­si­bil­i­ty will be to con­cede that our best eco­nom­ic minds have not been up to the task of ar­tic­u­lat­ing a vi­able strat­e­gy to cre­ate a suc­cess­ful civil­i­sa­tion af­ter slav­ery, in­den­ture­ship and colo­nial­ism.

Such a con­clu­sion will be at vari­ance with the un­doubt­ed con­tri­bu­tion of the Caribbean to the mod­ern world in sport­ing ex­cel­lence, in acad­e­mia, in pro­duc­ing world-class en­ter­tain­ers, ac­tive sci­en­tists, writ­ers, even states­men and women of great char­ac­ter, in­clud­ing Sir Ram­phal, whom the think tank is named af­ter.

It seems far more prob­a­ble then, to lean to the known in­abil­i­ties of Cari­com gov­ern­ments, po­lit­i­cal par­ties and politi­cians, who have over decades found one rea­son or an­oth­er to stand in the way of in­te­gra­tion to ex­ploit the re­sources of the re­gion, in­clud­ing the hu­man ca­pac­i­ty.

An easy and glar­ing­ly out­stand­ing ex­am­ple is that of the con­tin­u­ing re­fusal by many coun­tries and in­di­vid­u­als to ac­cept the Caribbean Court of Jus­tice as their fi­nal court in pref­er­ence to the British Privy Coun­cil.

At Cari­com’s lead­er­ship lev­el to­day is a blend of rel­a­tive­ly new prime min­is­ters and pres­i­dents with ex­pe­ri­enced ones. The ques­tions for all of them must be: do they suf­fi­cient­ly be­lieve in the val­ue of the eco­nom­ic and trad­ing pro­grammes put for­ward by a few gen­er­a­tions of the re­gion’s best thinkers and do they have the courage to leave be­hind nar­row provin­cial and in­di­vid­ual think­ing in pref­er­ence for the in­te­gra­tionist ap­proach? Does this cur­rent group of re­gion­al lead­ers have what it takes to achieve the decades-old ob­jec­tives in the in­ter­est of the Caribbean peo­ple? The above are ques­tions for Caribbean peo­ple to an­swer.