President Bharrat Jagdeo hopes to secure the support of his CARICOM colleagues for a review of institutions like the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) to be put on the agenda for the July meeting of the CARICOM Heads in Guyana.

The review, he said, would be to determine the relevance of the functions of the various institutions to the achievements of the community's present objectives.

Reporting yesterday at a press conference at the Office of the President on his attendance at the just-concluded Intersessional Meeting of the CARICOM Heads in Belize, President Jagdeo, said that he had raised the need for such a review in the light of the decision taken regarding resuscitation of the regional news agency which dramatically suspended its operations in January over a money crunch. He noted that the CARICOM governments would await the outcome of the drafting of a business plan with the assistance of a consultant to be paid for by some governments and a management audit by the CARICOM Secretariat to decide whether or not they would contribute to its operations. CMC was said to be seeking US$2M in rescue aid.

However, President Jagdeo said that his position was that he and his colleagues needed to determine what kind of image they wanted to project to the rest of the world and what kind of information flow was needed within the region to support the integration process. "When we have settled that then [we can] talk about institutions and the medium to carry that message.

"CMC and its difficulties now will give us that opportunity to address this issue in a more profound way and that should guide our considerations to a large extent, because to tell the truth I don't think we even project a combined image to the rest of the world."

He said that the current information flow now in the region was more news based and not designed to support the integration movement.