The talk is remarks made on Tuesday by Jamaican prime minister, Mr. P J Patterson, and his counterpart from St Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr. Ralph Gonsalves.

Mr. Patterson is the chairman of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and Dr. Gonsalves heads a committee of CARICOM leaders and technocrats who were asked to draft a management and governance structure for the community as it prepares to transform itself into a single market and economy.

It is expected that CARICOM leaders at their summit in Montego Bay, starting at the end of this month, will review, and hopefully make a decision, on the Gonsalves proposals.

Neither Dr. Gonsalves nor any of his colleagues has publicly indicated what these are likely to be, but the remarks of both the Jamaican and Vincentian leaders have been particularly encouraging.

Indeed, Dr. Gonsalves Tuesday acknowledged the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) to be "the most ambitious form of economic union that it is possible to conceive". Indeed!

But the region, despite the achievements of CARICOM over the past three decades, as Dr. Gonsalves conceded, does not have in place the management that is "appropriate to the task at hand and in the circumstance of modern globalization."

Implicit in the Vincentian leader's statement is that the region cannot go forward with this ambitious initiative, hoping that complex institutions can be managed with any substantial degree of success by people who have other full-time day jobs. Which is substantially the case now with CARICOM in having prime ministers who have specific portfolio responsibility for areas of the community's work, for which they liaise with the secretariat. Neither does the CARICOM Bureau, the smaller group of leaders charged with monitoring the community's work, provide the best model of how to drive the implementation of decisions.

There are a number of reasons why the current system has not worked well in the past and why it cannot work well in the future.

We doubt that all the regional leaders who have signed up to CARICOM and the CSME are committed to the ideal. Like us, they appreciate, and fully subscribe to, the essential logic of conglomeration. The wider economic space represented by the CSME will offer greater opportunities for Caribbean peoples and provide the community with greater insulation against outside perils. Our sum will be greater number of our individual parts.

But that notwithstanding, regional leaders are elected as leaders of their national states and sometimes see national objectives in political terms and in short-term conflict with national ones. And with their day jobs of running their countries, they just do not have the time to adequately manage the nitty-gritty of CARICDOM/CSME affairs.

It is critical, therefore, that an arrangement be put in place that divests heads of government of the day-to-day responsibility of running the CSME. They should shape broad policy.