If ever there was op­por­tu­ni­ty and ne­ces­si­ty for Cari­com coun­tries to ful­ly im­ple­ment the 30-year old Cari­com Sin­gle Mar­ket and Econ­o­my, the “sub­dued glob­al eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty and glob­al trade” of the present makes it the right “Time for Ac­tion.”

The Eco­nom­ic Com­mis­sion for Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean (ECLAC) states there is “grow­ing un­cer­tain­ty, volatil­i­ty and fi­nan­cial fragili­ty” in the in­ter­na­tion­al econ­o­my.

ECLAC’s 2019 sur­vey of the Hemi­sphere states there ex­ists to­day “a ques­tion­ing of the mul­ti­lat­er­al trad­ing sys­tem and an in­crease in geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions.” Cari­com is there­fore fac­ing an in­ter­na­tion­al en­vi­ron­ment that is not pro­pi­tious for our tra­di­tion­al trade pat­terns. That means that in­di­vid­ual coun­tries in the re­gion can­not con­tin­ue to de­pend on tra­di­tion­al ex­ter­nal mar­kets to sell prod­ucts and ser­vices.

There is there­fore the need is to do some­thing dif­fer­ent.

That some­thing dif­fer­ent was ar­tic­u­lat­ed at the 1989 Gran Anse, Grena­da Cari­com Heads of Gov­ern­ment Con­fer­ence in the plan to es­tab­lish the CSME. The plan then was and con­tin­ues to be to link the economies of the re­gion to pro­duce se­mi-fin­ished and fin­ished goods and ser­vices for the in­ter­nal and ex­port mar­kets.

This as op­posed to the trade pat­terns of our his­toric past, that of pro­duc­ing and ex­port­ing raw ma­te­ri­als for the ex­ter­nal mar­ket.

We have laboured over the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the CSME for decades. The pro­pi­tious mo­ment comes now: in an un­cer­tain in­ter­na­tion­al eco­nom­ic en­vi­ron­ment and the need of a ba­sis for re­gion­al eco­nom­ic growth.

On the pos­i­tive side of the graph there is a rar­i­ty: “for the first time since 2007, all of the Caribbean coun­tries are ex­pect­ed to post pos­i­tive growth,” this year states Dr Dil­lon Al­leyne, Deputy Di­rec­tor, Sub-Re­gion­al Of­fice of ECLAC.

This over­all growth is fur­ther en­hanced as the ma­jor economies of Ja­maica and Trinidad and To­ba­go are show­ing signs of re­cov­ery. Very sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Guyana con­tin­ues to dis­cov­er oil de­posits. In all of this there ex­ist a few bases for growth in the re­gion.

In this con­text, the ECLAC sub-re­gion­al di­rec­tor notes that "T&T has to do more to di­ver­si­fy its econ­o­my.” The coun­try, in the words of Dr Dil­lon, has to move away from “pol­i­cy-mak­ing that is large­ly on how they get the oil sec­tor go­ing, and how they will dis­cov­er new finds.”

The mes­sage is for the Gov­ern­ment and pri­vate cap­i­tal to seek to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my based on re­gion­al pro­duc­tion of goods and ser­vices for in­ter­nal and ex­ter­nal mar­kets by com­bin­ing the phys­i­cal and hu­man re­sources of the re­gion.

The great­est needs of the day are for en­tre­pre­neur­ship across the re­gion­al pri­vate sec­tor, the un­der­min­ing of in­su­lar­i­ty, po­lit­i­cal in­sight and the po­lit­i­cal will to go for­ward un­der the CSME.