As Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar participates in the Sixth Summit of the Americas, in Cartagena, Colombia, 18 years after the inaugural summit took place in Miami, the initial objective remains unachieved-the establishment of a truly free trade area of the Americas.
The ambition in Miami was to lay the groundwork to create this single market, approximating one billion people, from the North Pole to Tierra del Fuego-Cuba being the exception. Small sub-regions such as the Caribbean and Central America were excited by the possibilities of producing for and getting their products into the rich and large markets of the USA, Canada and the likes of Brazil, Argentina and Mexico, free of high tariffs and stifling bureaucracy.
The expectation was that the opening of markets in Caricom and other small sub-regions would be balanced by access to the markets listed above. The reality is that has not evolved. Indeed, Caribbean banana producers had traditional preferences for their products in the European Union eliminated by the World Trade Organisation (WTO), on the protest of large American fruit companies producing bananas in Central and South America-even though Caribbean bananas accounted for a mere eight per cent of the fruit exported into the EU.
The banana industry in Caricom has all but died. Moreover, regional countries which shifted to tax-free offshore financial centres and gambling casinos have been faced with strictures and compliance requirements which have badly affected those sectors. This country's ambitions for an offshore financial sector drowned off the port at Wrightson Road.
The impact of the failures on Trinidad and Tobago has been severe, especially when it is considered that this country spent approximately US$250 million to host the Fifth Summit of the Americas here in Port-of-Spain in 2009. Amongst the ambitions of that summit, presided over by then Prime Minister Patrick Manning, were the hopes for physical integration and hemispheric co-operation to counter crime, insecurity, poverty and natural disasters and to enhance mutual understanding across sub-regions and countries.
That is the agenda facing Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar and her colleagues, who so far have little to show to their populations from past summits. Politically, the hemisphere has grown further apart as socialist ideology has gained prominence in Latin America, in opposition to the dominant capitalist model of North America.
Socialist orientation has increased to the point that Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has been promoting a Bolivarian Alternative for the Peoples of the Americas, with many Latin American governments insisting that Cuba cannot be left out of any hemispheric grouping.
At the Port-of-Spain Summit, this country witnessed Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega giving delegates, especially US President Barack Obama, an earful of anti-American socialist feelings, backed up by President Chavez. There are many nations which are now concluding that the summits have degenerated into useless talk shops as the Organisation of American States, a members' club of national governments, remains unable to bring coherence and purpose to them.
At the WTO level, there continues to be unresolved conflict between the hemispheric super-states, Brazil and the USA, in agriculture and trade in services, including procurement. T&T and other Caricom countries cannot simply fall off or ignore the world trade agenda; they are too small and too dependent on international trade to do so.
As well as co-operation on trade, another mutual aim must be the development of a joint strategy to counter crime, as a result of the illegal hemispheric trade in drugs and ammunition. Also important, however, is a serious assessment amongst regional states as to the benefits that have accrued as a result of being part of the hemispheric grouping and means of closing the gap between the expectations and the reality.
