Congratulations Caricom. Your genuine achievements are not to be underestimated. Now that all the big guns have come and gone it is still up to you, your governments, institutions, and our citizens to look after the business of our people. That is why Caricom exists, not so? To look after the business and welfare of Caribbean people? You have done ok so far, but the world is changing faster than you are responding!
It is now time to accelerate the pace of progress of 1) economic integration–economic well-being depends on it. 2) in regional cooperation, collaboration, and cohesion–for unity with clarity in the global political, economic, and financial spheres 3) to play a meaningful role in western hemispheric governance where we live and 4) to contribute towards defining the rules of a global order that remains to be firmed up and accepted as fair and reasonable in the context of challenging problems in a technology-driven world, destined to marginalise large numbers of countries and people as it transforms.
Do not be dismayed by the size of our populations, the smallness of our countries or the absence of military might. Do not feel diminished by lack of geopolitical power or the limitations of economic leverage or the limits of our financial muscle.
Commit, however, to policies and actions aligned to good governance, shared economic prosperity for our people, and climate change-responsive, sustainable development strategies, to protect the natural asset value of the region. Focus on food sustainability and innovation in tourism and cultural assets.
Be vigilant about what is happening to the planet because, in our region, we are living with the consequences of climate change more than most others.
How will global warming and climate change be contained or reversed and paid for? After all, islands are going to be hardest hit, and the Caribbean, if we continue to waffle and equivocate, and just talk, are going to receive a solid whiplash over time. What is the sense of begging for help every time a disaster hits? Let us build an agenda of anticipatory, preparatory, adaptation, and mitigation actions and advocate persistently with collaboration for sustained support.
Focus also on the huge technological, economic, and financial divides that are escalating, the impacts of these on the majority of the eight billion people who inhabit our planet, and the levels of poverty and economic and social distress that need to be bridged.
Against this global background, look at the condition of our citizens in each national homeland and across the region and identify what needs to be done and what measures need to be actioned. Let us then begin with coherent national and regional economic strategies for sustainability that can win financial and economic support to take these countries out of the middle-income country trap in which they are currently stuck. Take collaborative steps to embed these economies into the technologically driven, rapidly transforming value chain that is strengthening across the world economic system. These are at the heart of the problem.
Our countries have become uncompetitive and we are way too slow and backward in the absorption and deployment of available technologies.
Won’t we have to help ourselves, get things right, and achieve our identified human and socio-economic aspirations if we expect the world to take us seriously?
The inequalities across the countries of the Americas are severe, as indeed, it is, across the countries of Caricom. This, at least in part, fuels migration, violent crime as well as white-collar crime, drugs, guns, and human trafficking and creates fertile ground for corruption as well, which makes it even more difficult to address the grave challenges mentioned above.
We must bring export-focused investments and a large number of tourists to these islands and South American mainland countries in our region, and we must digitalise our public and private sectors. We must educate our people in alignment with local and regional skills demand in a more competitive regional economy and with global market demand for technologically sophisticated skills so that these small economies can access global markets and jobs, win tourists for leisure, business, and conferences, and develop the capacity to generate jobs and incomes in sustainable tourism, agribusiness and creative industries which can all be connected In a formidable value chain.
With a vigorous thrust in nearshoring in this hemisphere, there are opportunities that we can grasp. But we must fix gangs and crime.
The task at hand is to grow economies, create jobs and incomes, increase national and regional wealth, improve purchasing power for citizens, and to implement sustainable development strategies that work so that we can break out and free ourselves to enjoy a better life and attract productive energies to this paradise region of the planet that God and the forces of history have given to us, and which if we continue to misgovern, would be simply sacrilege.
