THE Declaration of Margarita, adopted at the 3rd Summit of ACS Heads of State and Government on December 11-12, begins with a pledge to establish the region of the Greater Caribbean as a Zone of Co-operation.

With this mission, the ACS has acquired a distinct identity and personality as a regional organisation.

Currently there are some 2,050 international and regional organisations in existence. The regional bodies are concerned either with integration, such as CARICOM and the European Union (EU), or with functional co-operation.

Some co-operation organisations are for a specific sector such as security (e.g. NATO) or health (e.g. PAHO). Others promote co-operation across a wide range of sectors of common interest to the countries in a particular region.

Free trade and economic integration may or may not be included among the objectives, but the organisation takes its rationale from functional co-operation in pursuit of common interests around a shared geographic space. This is what constitutes a Zone of Co-operation.

A well-known example of such a grouping is the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Established in 1967, ASEAN now embraces 10 major states in the Southeast Asian region with an aggregate population of 500 million and GDP of $685 billion. The ACS is roughly comparable in size: its population is 228 million and its GDP is $750 billion.

The target date for the establishment of the ASEAN Free Trade Area is 2008, but intra-ASEAN trade is already $71 billion. Besides trade, ASEAN co-operation embraces Culture and Information, Science and Technology, and Social Development.

Another example is the Black Sea Economic Co-operation Zone (BSEC); a grouping of 11 states bordering the Black Sea aimed at ensuring that it becomes a sea of peace, stability and prosperity.

The BSEC is developing co-operation in nine different areas and involves governments, parliaments, private enterprise, banking and finance and the academic and scientific community. It has established the BSEC Business Council, the International Centre for Black Sea Studies and the Black Sea Universities Network and is now promoting a Black Sea Environment Programme.

ASEAN and the BSEC show that shared geographic space is a powerful rationale for regional co-operation and generates a dynamic that is independent of a free trade agenda, in areas such as regional security, transport, and the environment. ASEAN also shows the value of "starting small" while "thinking big", having evolved over 34 years.

Wisely, the ACS has opted to concentrate its efforts for the development of a Zone of Co-operation in the four priority areas of trade, sustainable tourism, transport and natural disasters.

In each of these areas the Margarita Declaration and Plan of Action sets out actions to be accomplished over the next two years. They include the reduction of obstacles to intra-ACS trade and the coordination of positions in international fora on the treatment of small economies; the finalisation of an air transport agreement among member states to facilitate intra-regional air travel; full operationalisation of the Convention on the Sustainable Tourism Zone of the Caribbean; and ratification of the ACS Agreement on Natural Disasters.

The full list has been published on the ACS website to facilitate the involvement of civil society by means of providing feedback and monitoring implementation.

The challenges for 2002 are exciting.

This column wishes all its readers the very best for the New Year.

** Professor Norman Girvan is Secretary General of the Association of Caribbean States. The views expressed are not necessarily the official views of the ACS. Feedback can be sent to mail@acs-aec.org