OUR CARIBBEAN: Much Politics As Heads Meet
by Rickey Singh
THE HEADS of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) have a range of pressing problems to resolve among themselves today before their formal participation in the Second Summit of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS) which begins this evening in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Since their tenth Inter-Sessional Meeting in the Surinamese capital, Paramaribo March 4-5, from which five of the heads of government of the 15-member community were absent, this is their first face-to-face encounter to deal with matters such as: The future of the region’s banana industry against the recent ruling in favour of the US by the World Trade Organisation on the European Union’s preferential import regime; political problems in Guyana and Haiti; debt payments to the secretariat of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) as well as the effectiveness of the 25-nation ACS that was launched in Port-of-Spain in 1995. At the level of OECS sub-regional politics, the decision by St. Lucia’s Prime Minister Kenny Anthony to withhold further payments of EC$2 million in annual financial support for the OECS secretariat in protest against repeated failures by some governments to honour their debts, has provoked public criticisms from his Grenadian counterpart, Keith Mitchell, whose government is one of the main defaulters. Neither the public bickerings nor assurances by OECS leaders on debt payments is of help to the OECS secretariat whose programmes are being jeopardised for lack of financial support, though it has not reached a crisis stage. On the wider issue of pressures from the US that have effectively derailed even the revised EU banana import regime, the CARICOM leaders in general would be mindful that the ACS itself has proven to be a rather ineffective forum for a mutually acceptable solution between Central American banana producers and Caribbean exporters of the fruit. They are among the founding member countries of the ACS that was established to promote trade, economic and functional co-operation. Even for the two-day ACS summit, the ongoing dispute over this region’s banana market in Europe is not on the agenda. But the CARICOM leaders decided to convene a special meeting prior to the start of the ACS event, to formulate the approach they intend to pursue during a private working session with their ACS counterparts on the so-called “banana war” . Following the ACS summit, the CARICOM leaders are expected to signal the next move in their decision, taken at their meeting in Suriname, to critically review the security segment of the 1997 “Bridgetown Accord” on trade, economic and security co-operation with the US. A planned meeting between CARICOM Foreign Ministers and US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright for Washington this month to discuss the status of that accord in the context of the dispute over bananas, has had to be postponed, at the request of the US, in view of the Kosovo crisis. President Rene Preval of Haiti is expected to provide an update on the escalating political problems in his country as preparations begin with a newly established Provisional Electoral Council for new national elections. The impasse that has developed in the dialogue process between Guyana’s governing People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and the main opposition People’s National Congress (PNC) is also on the leaders’ agenda. The community’s facilitator for the political dialogue in Guyana, Maurice King, will be present for this session that will determine on what basis he should return to Georgetown to continue his mandate. 
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