Byron Blake, Assistant Secretary-General (Regional Trade and Economic Integration) is leaving the Caribbean Community Secretariat after almost 30 years, all but just under two years of which he has spent in Guyana. Despite the ups and downs of the movement he has remained a firm advocate of Caribbean integration.
Blake has attended all but the first conference of Caricom Heads of Government, all of their special conferences and has served the community during the leadership of political giants, the likes of Michael Manley and Edward Seaga of Jamaica, Errol Barrow and Tom Adams of Barbados, Forbes Burnham of Guyana and Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago.
Blake, a Jamaican by birth and Caribbean man by choice, joined the Caribbean Secretariat then being led by the late William Demas after graduating from the University of the West Indies with a degree in Economics. He returned to complete his Master's Degree, one of the two periods he left the Secretariat. The other period was an eight-month secondment to the Jamaican government.
Current Affairs, in an interview with Blake, talked with him about the achievements of the integration movement, the challenges that were overcome and his overall assessment of the progress thus far towards an integrated Caribbean.
The early years
Byron Blake joined the Caribbean Secretariat on September 12, 1970 as a Research Assistant but that job description was changed to Economist 1.
When he joined the secretariat its head was William Demas OC, whom he described as "the only person that could have persuaded him to come to Guyana."
He said the Secretariat was looking for two persons to set up a Transportation Unit at the same time he was thinking about where to work so that he could make a worthwhile contribution. The other person who joined the secretariat with him was Roland Malins-Smith who has since left the secretariat and is in the shipping business in Miami.
He described those early days as exciting and challenging as they were setting up the unit from scratch without any technical advice save that provided by a consultant from the United Nations Development Programme stationed in Trinidad and from the West Indies shipping Company.
Blake said while setting up the unit they were also looking at setting up an information database for use in their negotiations with the shipping companies plying between Europe and the Caribbean.
He explained that at the time freight rates were increasing rapidly and were a burden on the region.
With regards to air transport, which was much more his responsibility since Malins-Smith had developed a deep interest in shipping, the unit was looking at rationalising the various services with a view to creating a regional carrier, as a 1968 working group had recommended.
At the same time the unit was involved in servicing the committee which was negotiating the airfares to the region with the major airlines serving the Caribbean. In those days, he said, countries had to approve the airfares and freight rates set by the airlines.
Despite the work his unit was involved in, Blake said his interest, generally in development economics, kept him involved in most areas of the secretariat's work particularly that concerned with deepening the integration process by moving from a free trade area to a common market.
Blake said between 1970 and 1979 his promotion was rapid, moving from Economist 1 to II to Senior Economist to Chief, Economic Research and Policy to Director, Sectoral Planning and Policy. It was during this period that he completed a Master's degree in Economics at the University of the West Indies.
Major challenges
Some of the challenges that had to be overcome in moving from a Caribbean Free Trade Area (CARIFTA) to the Caribbean Common Market, Blake said, were internal and external.
He explained that under a Free Trade Area arrangement the benefits accrued much more to those countries with an industrial base than to those without. And the motivation for moving to a Common Market arrangement was to be able to provide specifically for the Least Developed Countries (LDCs) by putting mechanisms in place to deal with social issues. This would allow for the disadvantages of a straight free trade arrangement to be redressed.
Blake added that the Common Market arrangement would create the conditions that would allow for the less developed countries to access the agriculture markets of the more developed states. Another mechanism that was put in place was a fund to help the less developed countries.
The Common External Tariff
Another major external challenge was in moving away from the Commonwealth preference which the region enjoyed for its exports. He said the region had built up a large preferential market with the United Kingdom which at the time was moving towards Europe and which if the arrangement continued, the region would have had to extend the preferential access to the member countries of the then European Common Market.
This emerging relationship between the United Kingdom and Europe was the motivation for the removal of the Commonwealth tariff and the introduction of the Common External Tariff which replaced the Commonwealth Preferential Tariff and the General Tariff.
Oil Crises
The oil crisis of May, 1973, according to Blake, occurred between the negotiation and the signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas and it, together with the subsequent crisis of 1979 created great difficulties for the economies of the region, particularly those of Guyana and Jamaica which left them unable to meet their Free Trade obligations.
He explained that a multilateral credit system was established as a short-term measure but that it soon ran into difficulties as the member states were unable to meet their obligations to it. Another mechanism that should have been put in place was a regional stabilisation fund but the resources for setting up the fund were not available.
Another significant challenge that beset the community between the mid-70s to the late 1980s were the sharp ideological differences among the member states that were only contained by the decision to accept the concept of ideological pluralism.
Single Market and Economy
In the face of all the internal and external challenges, Blake said that Caricom leaders took the fundamental decision in 1989 to establish the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME) as a means of deepening the integration process further. He explained that by then the ideological stress had diminished as more of the leaders had come to accept an ideology based on the market. Thus it was easier to agree on putting arrangements in place for the creation of a single market.
In that context, Blake said that the progress made from CARIFTA to the CSME has been remarkable though greater progress would have been made in a more propitious environment.
He lists the spectacular achievements as the removal of the trade barriers between member countries, the movement of capital across the region and the trade in services across the region, to be in place by the end of next year.
But Blake said that there are still a number of areas in which progress has not been at an acceptable level and he cited the trade in goods, which in 1973 centred around three countries but which today centres on just one. However, he believes that that the opening up of the market for services could overcome the imbalance, which he describes as a major structural problem.
Blake explains too that the new international trading arrangements through the World Trade Organisation including those related to services do not allow much scope for affording any advantage to domestic producers and investors. He said WTO member countries are also constrained by the level of the tariffs in place since 1994 in its efforts to use this as a means of helping domestic producers meet the competition from outside the region.
Political Will
About the political will of the present day leaders to move the integration process forward, Blake said in the early the days the then leaders were more committed to creating a Caribbean space in the world, perhaps because the external pressures were not as intense.
The member states had more financial capacity then than now and as such were able to take independent decisions without reference to any conditions set by the international financial institutions. As such, he observed there had been a greater will to have an independent Caribbean and he does not get a sense of the same level of unity of purpose in trying to get it done.
Role of the Secretariat
About the role of the secretariat, Blake said that in the early days the process was heavily driven by the secretariat and its leadership even though its legal position was an administrative one. He explained that this was particularly so under Demas whom member states did not disagree with even though he went beyond what they had decided because they felt what he was doing was important.
Blake recalled the late Lee Moore, a former head of government of St Kitts/Nevis saying to him that he agreed with Demas 80 per cent of the time but that he did not worry about the 20 per cent he did not agree with as the 80 per cent needed to be done.
Technical Advice
Asked to describe his relationship with the powerful Caribbean leaders over the years, Blake observed that those with political responsibility employ persons like him to advise them. His approach was to always give the best technical advice, which may not be always right, and leave it to the politicians to make their decision about what they do with that advice.
He recalled a conversation with the late Michael Manley, a former Jamaican Prime Minister, telling him that some advisers tell their leaders what they think they want to hear and that this approach did not help them with solving the problem. But he said Manley told him that in his (Blake) case, he said things which angered him but he knew that it was his technical view.
Generally, he said that he really did not have a difficulty working with these leaders, smilingly adding that in any case they knew when they were getting good advice.
Living in Guyana
Blake has lived for the past thirty years in Guyana and his two elder children, Oheni and Obena were born here. The third, Omari, who was born in Jamaica while he was on an eight-month secondment to the Jamaican government, died in a car crash in the United States of America two years ago. He was just six months away from graduating as a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine from Tuskegee University.
Blake described the death of his son as a tremendous loss to the world as "he was a guy who really had a capacity to make a tremendous contribution to the world."
Both his surviving children have followed Blake into public service. The eldest, Oheni has a Master's degree in Information Systems and is Director of Youth in Jamaica and the younger brother, Obena, who has a Master's degree in International Business is with the Jamaica Consulate in Miami.
His wife Claire, by whose name he says he is recognised, is a graduate of the University of Guyana from where she obtained a Master's degree in Education and the University of the West Indies from where she obtained a Diploma in Education.
A long time teacher of English, Claire had been a deputy head and acting head of Queen's College for a number of years before retiring two years ago.
Commenting on the economic problems the country has faced since he was here, Blake said that in economics things tend to move in a direction and they have a tendency to escalate.
He observed that in the early 1970s the economy was "pretty buoyant" particularly in the mining sector, and there was a good agricultural sector. There were signs that the government was looking to open up the country, which it had not been able to do by putting down the relevant infrastructure. He said that it then ran into economic difficulties from which it has never really recovered.
Blake recalled telling C Y Thomas, Professor of Economics at the University of Guyana, following Burnham's death, that it would take the country at least ten years to recover from the economic crisis that it was in. He said his comment was based in part on the fact that over the years Guyana has lost a great part of its managerial and technical expertise which could not be attracted back to the country in the short-term. Another factor was the difficulty that would be encountered in attracting investment to build the infrastructure required to push the development of the country against the backdrop of its debt burden.
Retirement
Blake, who is returning to his native Jamaica to live, said he has not had the time to think about what he wants to do with his time when he finally leaves the secretariat in September. Though he formally retired a few weeks ago, a year before the statutory retirement age of 60, Blake is engaged in a special project for the secretariat and that comes to an end in the next two months or so.
As a consequence he said he is now too busy to think about anything else but what he is doing. But he does admit that with his wife retired and the two boys away from home, it is a little difficult to continue the hectic pace the job demanded.