CARICOM and its member nations
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
March 24, 2004
CARIBBEAN Community (CARICOM) Heads of Government are convening their 15th Inter-Session Meeting in St. Kitts/Nevis tomorrow and Friday at a time when the regional grouping is facing one of the sternest tests in its history.
HIV/AIDS is ravaging the region's most productive age group, at least 25 percent of the grouping's 7 million inhabitants are wiggling in poverty and, not least, an annual US$3 billion food imports bill is putting tremendous strain on individual economies just as, in the words of CARICOM Adviser on Agriculture Sam Lawrence, "starvation is creeping up on the region."
Besides, momentum on the regional integration plan slowed considerably last year when four member states agreed to form an integrated block
But if CARICOM as a whole is at a crossroads, so are relations between the grouping's individual nations.
Relations between member countries Guyana and Suriname and Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago have been fraught with tension especially over the past couple of months. Contrary to some analyses, the Guyana/Suriname maritime boundary dispute isn't simply the result of cross-cultural misunderstandings. Although Suriname and Guyana speak different languages, the two states have traditionally gotten along pretty well.
But action that hurts bilateral ties and threatens to stagnate another country's growth has had to be addressed. So it was as necessary as it was disappointing that both Barbados and Guyana have had to resort to international arbitration, under the provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, for a final and binding resolution to maritime delimitation disputes with Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname, respectively.
Notes Barbados Nation: "With the UNCLOS process underway, both Trinidad and Tobago and Suriname having formally responded, the challenge for all four of these member states of CARICOM is for them to soberly get ahead with practical cooperative arrangements, flowing from good faith negotiations, on how best they could foster fisheries, trade and economic relations without prejudice to the international arbitration.
On the agenda for their Inter-Sessional Meeting is the consideration of access to regional natural resources, and specifically identified for discussion is the issue of the creation of a 'Common Regional Fisheries Regime'.
It is relevant to note that when they held their 14th Inter-Sessional Meeting just over a year ago in Port-of-Spain, both the President of Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo, and the Prime Minister of Barbados, Owen Arthur, had enthusiastically articulated the need for a regional fisheries pact by the Community that provides for an executive authority.
Barbados went further and circulated a nine-page document on the approaches it envisaged in the evolution of a common regional fisheries policy.
Between then and last month, came the dramatic development of Barbados disclosing that its long-standing fishing dispute with Trinidad and Tobago had been extended to the even more significant level of the necessity to delimit maritime boundaries. Hence its resort to the UNCLOS process which, as everyone knows, is both costly and very lengthy.
The question now is since Guyana, which has been advocating fishing rights pacts with some of its CARICOM partners, among them Barbados, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago, will it and Barbados be disposed to press ahead with the proposed 'Common Regional Fisheries Regime' at this week's Basseterre meeting?
The feeling is that should the leaders of Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana and Suriname show that resilience and spirit of cooperation to improve and deepen relations at the bilateral level, it could pay dividends for the collective efforts of the Community in achieving major objectives such as the planned inauguration of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy and the Caribbean Court of Justice."