In an interview with the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation last week Tuesday in which he discussed the temporary closure of the Caribbean Media Corporation Prime Minister Owen Arthur of Barbados made the important point that this event raised the general issue of "the capacity of the Caribbean to support institutions that are at the centre of building a new regional society".

It is all well and good to utter ritual cries of anguish when efforts at creating regional facilities flounder but do they in fact receive the support they should when they are there. In other words, did enough newspapers and other media subscribe to the Caribbean News Agency (CANA) and did enough radio and television stations support the Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CPU) to make those institutions commercially viable? In the case of the latter, for example, it is well known that it would never have got going without substantial grants of equipment and technical help from overseas donors. Both CANA and CBU continued to benefit from overseas assistance throughout their existence. The men that ran them cannot be criticised for this. They did their best to cope with an always difficult situation and to enlist such help as they could.

Speaking about regional institutions Prime Minister Arthur said in his interview: "It is not very well known, but it is true that in the last three years, the Government of Barbados (GOB) has gone over and beyond the call of its duty and its obligations in its support for regional institutions and regional initiatives.

And I ought, I think, to put the record properly. We strongly supported the call for the establishing of regional negotiating machinery to the extent that the Caribbean was simultaneously negotiating as no other region in the World was required to negotiate in at least four theatres - the FTAA, WTO and elsewhere and there is a need for a regional machinery. We were the first government to advance funds to help the machinery come into existence. We have provided accommodation at our own cost and over and beyond the subvention as required by the budget to the RNM. But it is also true that over the course of the last l8 months the RNM would have collapsed were it not for the willingness of the GOB to provide it with overdraft facilities which at some times reached as high as $lm.

Secondly, it is not known for example that the Caribbean Congress of Labour (CCL) has been facing great financial difficulties and over the last two years my government has undertaken to meet the operating deficit of the CCL to ensure that the regional labour movement does not collapse. Our efforts have not been matched by other regional governments despite the plea by the organization and the GOB.

When there was the eruption of the volcano in Montserrat, the region agreed as part of a phase one initiative to build l5 houses. The l5 houses were not completed and we decided that the GOB was not going to be associated with failure and at a considerable cost to the GOB, almost half a million dollars, we sent in teams from the National Housing Corporation and organized resources from the private sector to finish it. And I could go on."

We need regional institutions, the rhetoric from politicians and intellectuals in favour of such institutions is strong, but we are not willing in practice to support them or to make adequate or competent arrangements to make them viable. It is a kind of childishness or naivete, only explicable in terms of the inborn insularity of most regional leaders. Despite what they may say, their imagination is usually limited by their borders and they only react, ritualistically, in a crisis.

If the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) is to survive and to develop the kind of regional programming which many have glibly called for without having the slightest idea how expensive it is? it needs a carefully prepared business plan. Our region clearly needs some mechanism to circulate information and news. One can, of course, read the regional newspapers on the internet but that facility is only available to a small section of the population. If CMC fails new regional private sector initiatives will eventually have to set up a mechanism to fill the gap. The core issue, at the end of the day, is whether such initiatives as CANA and CBU, now combined in the CMC, can be made commercially viable on a long term basis and on what terms.

The regional cause requires a level of commitment from our politicians, administrators and businessmen that is at present best exemplified by Prime Minister Arthur himself. As he put it in the same interview "Just last week, Barbados and the UN were party to the opening of United Nations House, which will be a regional institution. And very soon the GOB will again be supporting a regional cause by providing a facility from which the Caribbean Single Market and Economy unit can function. And I want to impress upon you how important this is. We have completed all of the legal arrangements and we have revised the Treaty of Chaguaramas to bring a Single Market and Single Economy into existence, but that Single Market and Single Economy will continue to be a fiction unless people go to work every day to make it become a living reality.

Right now there is no single market and single economy, and there is no facility to house it in Guyana. The government of Guyana undertook in the l970s to build a headquarters for Caricom which has not yet been built. And we, in pursuit and in support of the obligation that falls to us to exercise lead responsibilities to the Single Market and Single Economy have undertaken to provide accommodation and equipment for that unit, to give an energy to it until Caricom can have its own headquarters.

Now I say all that just to outline the range of things that we have been doing and to set the stage for us in this particular instance to say that there must be a regional solution."