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Feature Address by The Rt.Hon. Owen S. Arthur at the Launch of the Foundation for Politics and Leadership in Port of Spain, Trinidad

Having regard to the recent electoral events in Barbados, I thought that there might have been an element of the picong for which Trinidad is famous in the invitation to me to share my thoughts on the future of the Caribbean.

And was this, indeed, an occasion for picong, it would be enough for me simply to say that our future is not what it used to be.

I choose rather to acknowledge the seriousness and the historic significance of the moment, and the imposing potential of the institution whose launch we celebrate by our presence here today.

I choose also to be here, not to support a partisan political cause, but to be associated with the perpetuation and the refreshment of a tradition which sadly has been losing its place and its lustre in the Caribbean.

This Republic has known the tradition of Woodford Square – a phenomenon that represented a programme of popular political education that had no precedent, and has had no successor in the Caribbean.

And the greatest contribution of our region to the human condition has been the products of the creative imagination of its people, as expressed tangibly in the experiences of four Nobel Laureates, and in art forms and other cultural artifacts that are too numerous to mention.

It has been the strength of our creative imagination, the power of ideas, and the invocation of a special kind of pragmatic idealism, not the abundance of our physical and natural resources, that have given the Caribbean civilisation its special and its worthwhile character.

Our region is the world’s smallest and most vulnerable. It has had to endure the trauma of slavery and indentured servitude; the ravages of war, and long centuries of material exploitation. Our entire history has been characterised by the lurch from one crisis to the next.

None of this, especially in the modern era, has prevented the people of our region from setting great and lofty goals, and from evolving great institutions and personalities to express and to advance those goals.

We will fail in the Caribbean only if there is a recession of ideas, and the death of our idealism.

This matter is of significance because the Caribbean is now at a time and place where it has to contend with challenges that are as formidable, and in some respects more formidable that those with which it has had to grapple in its crisis-ridden history.

This year alone our entire economic relationship with our principal trading partners, beginning with the European Union and to be followed by Canada, is to be irreversibly changed in a manner that will set us on a new economic course, without our having the benefit of the comforting norms and landmarks of old to guide us.

There is also much unfinished business that needs to be urgently addressed in our efforts to develop our regional integration movement.

In the context of its global economic relations, the region faces new risks, threats and uncertainties on a scale that can be daunting – the spectre of global recession, a surge in commodity prices that is driven factors that will not easily go away, and an indifference by others to our circumstances because we are too small for our problems to matter in a world that is caught up in crisis.

The region also has to contend with new forces working to create social instability, and that are transforming some of our countries from being havens of peace, tranquillity and good order at an alarming rate.

We have also to contend with a revolution in material expectations, as our citizens link in to a global information network that exposes them to lifestyles whose satisfaction are putting new strains on our already limited resources.

In addition, the Caribbean will have to confront, as societies which have now largely become coastal economies, the adverse consequences of global warming and other environmental threats to the Caribbean Sea. We also face the spectre of water scarcity, which is now constituting a new threat to both the pace and direction of development in many Caribbean countries.

Among our various challenges, the incidence of HIV/AIDS remains at pandemic proportions throughout the region, compounded by the equally high and increasing incidence of non-infectious diseases that are taking a toll on our citizens.

We face also the social tensions that come from generational changes, which take the form of the distortion of values and norms that have constituted the traditional Caribbean way of life and their replacement by others, to our detriment.

Of special note also is the fact that among the countries of the Caribbean Community are to be found seven of the ten countries with the highest ratio of debt to GDP in the world.

And without doubt, the Caribbean stands with Africa as the place where the greatest transformations yet have to be made to accommodate the forces of liberalisation that are and that will continue to be at work in the new global economy. The essential difference is that Africa can expect substantial global support as it makes the transition. As for the Caribbean, we are essentially on our own, left to our own devices.

I could go on with the enumeration of our contemporary and projected challenges.

It may be said that our recent vicissitudes and the magnitude of the challenges the region faces have merely heightened the familiar circumstances of a crisis-prone region.

What makes these times new and especially difficult, and makes the launch of a Foundation such as this so essential, is the mood and the general intellectual environment within which Caribbean development has increasingly been shaped.

In a very telling piece entitled “Remembering to Score” Shirdath Ramphal had drawn a sharp contrast between the spirit of idealism that represented itself in an early period when the Caribbean had to come to terms with the need for urgent transformation, and a new spirit of malaise which has regrettably recently started to take root in the region.

He contrast the response that was exhibited in the early 1970s when the region had to advance to Caricom and to enter new relations with Europe, and the mood that has enveloped nation building and regional development of late. I quote at length: “The first thing to note about those times was our relative freshness and confidence. The times were propitious to innovation and welcoming to creativity. There was a mood of hope at large.… We may have lacked experience of the world, but we did not lack boldness or energy.

The times were propitious, too, in another respect which is best described in terms of the difference between then and now. Now the prevailing sense in Caribbean capitals, certainly on matters of trade and economic policy generally, but on other matters as well, is one of powerlessness, of constraints, of limitations, of incapacities. Then is the early seventies, there was still a sense of possibility; in our capitals the political issue was the choice of policy options. In the region, we talked of ideological pluralism; and in relations beyond the region we had a sense of negotiating potential. And that difference between then and now was not merely the difference between naiveté and realism…. We need to score.”

I will not, today, make light of the magnitude of the challenges which the contemporary Caribbean faces.

I stress however that we can respond successfully if, using the words of Norman Manley at Montego Bay in 1947, we learn again: “… how to marry expectation with reality; how to create a larger field of ambition; how to overcome the disadvantage of being too small to be heard in a world where silence means stagnation.”

The region must rise above the sense of powerlessness, which is in danger of taking root, and restore the power of ideas and the pragmatic idealism which has help it to master its affairs down through the ages. And it must face the future with confidence in every sphere where there is a challenge to be met.

Take for example, the matter of our response to global recession.

Throughout the region, there seems to be an overwhelming feeling that USA and global recession, and a prolonged spike in commodity prices, especially for oil, will wreck the fortunes of the Caribbean economy.

On matters such as this, we would do well to take heed of the perspective of Arthur Lewis.

Presenting the Eric Williams Memorial lecture here in 1983 he observed: “That there was a downturn in 1974 was in no way strange. The US economy has had major recessions about once every 18 years – 1873, 1892, 1907, 1927, 1956 and 1973. Capitalists panic and radicals announce that the system is finished. Instead the system has revived every time so far…”

Speaking in 1983, Sir Arthur would not have been in a position to know that following its 1973 recession, the USA would experience recession 18 years later in 1991, and from all accounts it set again, 18 years later to go into recession in 2008/2009.

What he fully understood was that there are cycles in economic and business activity that occur from time to time, and that carry elements of their own correction with them, or elicit policy responses that are designed to return the system to stability and prosperity.

The same is true of the spikes in commodity prices that the global and regional economy has from time to time experienced. They will inflict hardship for a while but responses can and will be set in train to restore stability and good order to economic systems.

The critical issue therefore is not so much whether the Caribbean economy will be affected by the recessionary tendencies and inflationary forces that seem now to be rampant everywhere. For sure it will be, and the pain is likely to be severe.

What matters most, and what will bear most on the kind of future we come to enjoy is the nature of the regions’ response to crisis.

Happily, the Caribbean comes to this juncture equipped with instruments for response that were not available to it during previous economic crises and recessions.

The arrangements to create the Caribbean Single Market have been in place since 2006. The programme and Plan of Action to create the Caribbean Single Economy by 2015 has been devised and approved.

Central to the process of reconstituting the Caribbean and Single Economy is the programme of Production Integration as spelt out in Chapter 4 of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramus. It cites the Agricultural Sector as one of the key sectors to benefit from such Production Integration. And an initiative bearing the name of the President of Guyana has been elaborated to bring production integration in the region’s agricultural sector from the stage of being a dream to becoming a reality.

Fortuitously, within a few days a Regional Agricultural Investment Forum will be convened in Guyana to consider pragmatic proposals for the transformation of the region’s agriculture. It should be treated as a Forum whose outcome will have a strategic bearing on our future.

The point in all this is that the crisis in global commodity production and pricing, while creating severe problems for the immediate, also opens a new opportunity for regional development.

At prevailing prices, it becomes practical to contemplate a programme of expanded and profitable agricultural production on a regional basis to deal with rising food prices and to address issues of food security which no one Caribbean country, acting on its own, can satisfactorily cope with.

The Caribbean Single Economy therefore can be of immediate and dramatic relevance at this moment of perceived crisis if it succeeds in enabling all Caribbean countries to participate in the formation of Pan-Caribbean companies, owned broadly by the people of the region, and drawing their technology, finance and management from the best resources in the Caribbean, to be the spearhead in the assault against rising food prices and food insecurity.

In addition, the impact on economies such as Guyana, Belize and Suriname could be profound, and make them such drivers of Caribbean development as to give the assurance that the new Caribbean Economy will also be a growing Caribbean Economy.

Eric Williams got it right in his discourse in 1944 on the Economic Future of the Caribbean in his remark:
“The people of the Caribbean have for some years increasingly recognised the principle of independence; it is now time for them to recognise the privilege of interdependence.”

Despite the troubling times, there is so much for the good that can be done in the Caribbean if we recognise the privilege of interdependence, and put it to work in practical ways.

In this respect, the Regional Development Fund must be brought into operation, and its effect felt in helping to bring both St. Vincent and Dominica into the Jet Age.

The region must agree on a new and revised programme of functional cooperation, and through the provision of a wider range of common services, especially in the health care and education sectors, find solutions to the social problems which are growing in severity when addressed only from a national perspective.

Regional integration, therefore as the process to create a larger field of ambition and opportunity for the citizens of the region, is a realistic and pragmatic option whose use must be accelerated at this so called moment of crisis in the region.

As was the case in the early 1970s, the region must not be timid about reordering its relations with the rest of the world.

It would be wonderful if we could continue to live in a world where our major trading partners were prepared to offer us trade preferences that they were not prepared to offer other developing countries, or to give us access to their markets without asking for access to ours in return.

Such a benevolent world has vanished.

In the field of external economic relation we have come to what Naipaul would call a Bend in the River, at which his dictum applies:
“The World is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

Hence, in defining our new economic relations with European Union, we have tried to secure the best possible deals for the Caribbean. Clearly there can be no arrangement such as the new EPA with Europe, which is intended to meet the various needs and interests of such a very diverse group of countries that will not reflect compromises which can be open to legitimate concern.

In the final analysis however the value of the new arrangement should be judged on whether the net benefits to the region are positive, and are greater than those can be garnered under the next best arrangement.

With this in mind, the judgement of those of us who had to make decisions about the EPA was that the net benefits to the region were likely to be positive, and greater that any potential benefits available to the Caribbean under alternatives such as the GSP.

Having said that, the European Union would undermine the spirit in which the new EPA was judged to be acceptable to the region if it now varies the conditions under which the region’s bananas faces competition in the European to negate any benefits that our regional producers thought were being provided in December 2007.

Overall, the factor that will determine the future the Caribbean stands to enjoy is the manner in which it manages the negotiation of a new set of relations with its principal trading partners and the global economy at large.

We must not only negotiate the best possible terms of engagement. It is even more critical that we use the period of transition between one set of relations and the other to devise and implement new domestic policies to build enterprises to world standards, and to create the institutional capacity to transform the typical Caribbean society into a competitive economy.

The challenges that the region faces mandate that there must be new thinking about new forms of regional Governance in order for it to be successful.

There is no doubt that a new Caribbean Single Market and Economy cannot be achieved and made to work, relying on the existing regional organs such as COFAP and COTED.

Not only do they meet too infrequent to manage effectively a regional economy but no significant authority has been devolved to these bodies to manage an economy in the manner in which a modern economy has to be managed and developed.

In addition, a new Caribbean Single Market and Economy will also be largely a Private Economy. A form of regional governance must therefore be devised to facilitate greater Private Sector Leadership and involvement in all aspects of the creation and management of the CSME.

The creation of the Caribbean Business Council and its formal adoption as an Organ of the Community was intended to be a step in this direction. Much however does not appear to be being made of this new institutional arrangement.
The need for new forms of governance does not only obtain at the level of the organs of the community. It also concerns the powers to be entrusted to the region’s leadership.

For almost 14 years, I functioned as the Caribbean citizen with the lead responsibility to create a CSME. I would like to believe that much was accomplished.

But it was largely through the resort to the power of advocacy rather that through the use of instruments of power made available to a leader to make things happen. Such instruments of powers to implement simply do not exist.

Someone once said that power without responsibility is the prerogative of a harlot. It might equally be said that responsibility without power, such as obtains in the leadership arrangements for the CSME, makes the person occupying the position likely to be a disciple of St. Jude. And St. Jude was the patron saint of lost causes.

I put the matter as starkly as this because the region has lived too long in the shadow of the failure of the Federation.

There is a clear distinction however that must be drawn between formal political integration and federation, and the creating of new instruments and modalities of governance to make integration processes within our community fully effective.

A new field of ideas therefore is required on this matter.

Finally, the region can rise above any crisis that confronts it if there is the resolve and the commitment, expressed in concrete actions, to make our region’s institutions work, and to be all successful.

For the willingness of the people of the Caribbean to buy into the efficacy of the regional approach to their affairs is diminished whenever there appears to be less than seriousness about the way in which regional institutions of great worth are treated.

In such a context the region’s attitude to the Caribbean Court of Justice can therefore stand as the metaphor for what is wrong with the Caribbean, and what must be put right.

Every society, no matter how basic or primitive, has generally established the basis for its legitimacy as a community by the mechanisms established to provide justice for its people.

As such, it may be asked, if we cannot be depended upon to provide justice for ourselves, what are we as a people? What does our independence really mean or amount to?

And when the greatest effort has been made to create a Court, made up of men and women of the highest possible integrity and intellect, and provided with every safeguard to ensure its judicial and financial independence, and we then fail to enable it to function, what message are we intent on sending other than that of powerlessness and aimlessness.

Indeed, are we not in danger of validating what was once said of us in the Caribbean: “There are no people there in the true sense of the word, with a character and purpose of their own.”

The future of the Caribbean will be brighter once we find the confidence to make something as vital as a regional Court function as intended, rather than remain in its present uncertain state.

It needs especially to be said here in Trinidad and Tobago, that a Government of this Republic not only signed the Agreement establishing the Court, but fought successfully to have the Court established here.

At a minimum that should impose a duty on the Government and people of this Republic to assist in making the Court become the great new Caribbean institution.

As for me, I look back on almost 14 years of leadership of Barbados, and count as one of my proudest moments the day, when after a long and tortured history, the people of Barbados stopped looking to London for justice and accepted the jurisdiction of the CCJ in all of its aspects.

Since then, I assure you that the sky has not fallen in; nor has the quality of justice available to the people of Barbados diminished by one iota.

We live in new times. There are times that will test men’s souls. They will also test the intellect and stir the creative imagination of the people of the Caribbean as never before.

This Foundation, whose launch we celebrate today should help to stir that creative imagination without which the Caribbean is nothing.

I therefore commend those who had the foresight to envision its creation. And I wish it every success, certain in the knowledge that like so many previous regional causes, it will grow in strength despite the fact that only a few were here to begin the journey.