Governance issues, disputes pose potent threat to CARICOM -Carrington Stabroek News January 17, 2001 The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is currently besieged by issues of governance, territorial disputes and external threats to the regional economy, Secretary-General Edwin Carrington has stated. When the threats facing the region are combined it is clear that the region is fighting a number of fundamental difficulties and the main prospect for CARICOM is to forge a united and single "economic space", Carrington said at the signing of an agreement with Canada for the funding of a Regional Trade Policy Project yesterday at the CARICOM Secretariat. The Secretary-General drew attention to the aspect of governance in the Caribbean which he said was a major issue of the region's affairs currently. Governance was the reason Haiti had not yet become a full member of CARICOM, he observed. Carrington noted that Haiti's application for membership of CARICOM was put forward in 1997. It found general approval but was subject to the terms and conditions of Article 29 in the Treaty of Chaguaramas. The terms and conditions were negotiated with Haiti and were accepted by the Haitian government but had to be ratified by the Haitian parliament. This brought the issue of governance into focus, Carrington said. The Haitian parliament did not exist for some time and when it eventually came into being in May last year, the question of its legitimacy came to the fore. This was compounded in November by the question of the legitimacy of the Haitian President, he stated. "We are now in a position where Haiti has been given political agreement. We have agreed on the technical conditions for accession [to CARICOM]. But the structure to legitimise and ratify are the issues in question because of governance," Carrington said. He said it was hoped that a decision would be made on the Haiti issue by the CARICOM heads of government meeting in Barbados next month. Carrington also noted that there was a problem of governance in Guyana. He pointed out it was the spin-off of the St Lucia Statement and the Herdmanston Accord coming after the 1997 elections, leading right up to the ruling on the elections by the High Court on Monday. In Trinidad, too, the government has not yet been formed following elections in December because of differences in the interpretation of the Constitution. The differences are particularly those between Prime Minister Basdeo Panday and President Arthur Robinson, he said. The main contention was whether losing candidates in the elections could be appropriately appointed as part of the country's executive. In St Vincent and the Grenadines the issue of benefits for parliamentarians led to a major showdown and resulted in the curtailment of the government's term of office and new elections to be held this year. "If you look just below the surface you begin to realise the models of Constitution and governance practices that we have in the region are not really indigenous. They were in large measure borrowed. And it's beginning to give the impression that these robes are not wearing too well on the body politic of our region." Apart from governance, CARICOM also faced the problem of territorial integrity, he said. There was the controversy between Guyana-Venezuela, disputes between Belize-Guatemala, Suriname-Guyana, and a lesser known maritime dispute between Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. Added to this there was the problem of external threats facing the regional economy. Carrington said even within arrangements like the Lome Convention and the Cotonou Agreement, which were designed for the benefit of countries such as those in CARICOM, there were prospects of threats to the region's economy. He pointed out that "before the ink was dried" on the Cotonou Agreement, the European Union (EU) came up with the Everything But Arms (EBA) proposal in which the least developed countries (LDC) could access the European market with their products on a duty-free basis. "The problem is not that anyone is opposed to these countries being given this treatment but you don't want the treatment to come at the expense of the developing countries who are struggling to avoid being least developed countries," Carrington stated. He said the EBA will undermine the rice market in which Guyana and Suriname have vested interests. The sugar industry and the banana market will also be affected. Guyana and Suriname are the only rice exporting countries in the ACP grouping. The total annual rice production for the two countries is about 800,000 tonnes, he said, with the amount exported being much less. One of the LDCs outside the ACP is Bangladesh which produces some 30 million tonnes a year. "Can you imagine [what would happen] if Bangladesh was to let loose half a million tonnes in the EU market free from duty and free from quantitative restrictions?" Carrington asked. Follow the goings-on in Guyana in Guyana Today