The View from Europe

David Jessop, Consultant and Non-Executive Director of the Caribbean Council, writes a weekly column providing a European perspective on Caribbean events, which is syndicated and widely read in the Caribbean press. An archive of the View from Europe columns be found below.

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Speaking in 1967 on joining the United Nations, the late Errol Barrow as Prime Minister of Barbados made clear that Barbados and the Caribbean “will be friends of all, satellites on none.” In this his last regular column  David Jessop, reflects on a much-changed world and why the region’s young people need to continue to fiercely defend that view. 

Middle ranking powers are emerging as important policy arbiters. They are seeking global outcomes that better respond to their own interests as China and the US become the dominant global economic actors, each offering competing approaches to development.

This will not just further reorder the post-cold-war world but will make the Caribbean’s regional and external relationships more fluid and complex, requiring business and governments to develop new thinking about the consequences and where future self-interest lies.

This changing geopolitical order may seem remote from the day to day lives of ordinary people, but as the recent surge in energy and food prices has shown, global politics, ideologically led wars, nationalism, and sanctions can rapidly affect everyone’s lives.

As islands caught in the stream of global political and economic events, Caribbean nations large and small, absent accepting the hegemony of a superpower, will in the coming years need to manage the ever-growing interest of a wide group of nations that see strategic advantage in developing a strong economic presence in the Americas.

So far the region despite its smallness, fragmented nature and vulnerability has largely been able to do so effectively. However, a much wider group of nations including Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Brazil, Mexico, India, and Iran through Venezuela, are now showing every sign of wanting to play a greater role in the Caribbean.  

Their interest is about more than the region’s sixteen votes at the UN and role in other multilateral fora. Positive investment opportunities in oil, gas, and tourism aside, it now also relates to the influence that may arise from having a presence in nations geographically proximate to the US. It is also about accumulating influence in the Americas as nations become less US centric and more politically assertive about their direction and needs.

All this is happening as CARICOM becomes ever less unified and fractious, other than on overarching issues such as climate change, making future economic deepening with larger Hispanic Caribbean neighbours improbable, and achieving the coherence the word Caribbean suggests unlikely.

All of which increases the region’s political vulnerability and the probability that its international relations will fragment.

The trends are there for all to see.

Underpopulated but increasingly wealthy Suriname and Guyana plus Trinidad with Venezuela are emerging as energy powerhouses for the western hemisphere and are being actively courted by the US, China, and a multitude of other nations. China’s rise and economic profile in the region continues unabated, seemingly with some nations being of greater significance than others. The US is slowly recognising it must speak with a softer voice while seeking to consolidate a multi-faceted special relationship with Jamaica, The Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, and the Guianas. Realpolitik is causing Washington to modify its now largely failed attempt to isolate Venezuela, enabling Caracas to fully restore its PetroCaribe initiative and influence in the Caribbean and Central America. Cuba, as President Diaz Canel’s recent visit to China showed, is prepared to throw it a significant long-term economic lifeline. And Europe continues to care but lacks the interest to do much more than provide development and security support.

Add to this the likely regional investment role of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, India, Turkey, Mexico and Venezuela, and Caribbean nations individually, jointly or in new more complimentary sub-regional groups, will have to  determine how to manage the pressures and complexity that new relationships may bring.

A further complicating factor is the real possibility in the coming decade the process of consolidation already underway between some of the region’s biggest enterprises could once again see external corporate acquisition delivering majority overseas ownership of pan-Caribbean companies.

Other less benign equally powerful actors are also at work. They too see the Caribbean geopolitically and seek opportunity. Although rarely spoken about in the same way, the countries of the region, its politicians, security forces, economies, and cyber security, continue to be targeted by globally-linked organised crime networks whose economic reach and social influence potentially pose a far greater threat to sovereignty than any foreign government.

All of which will likely see the Caribbean having not just to ask but to find answers to what this may mean for the region, its future unity and long-term economic development, and more fundamentally, how small nations remain the mistress and master of their own destiny?

What answers there are seem unlikely to be found in greater integration, but through the dogged pursuit of national enlightened self-interest, involving overlapping sub-regional economic groupings working as required with nations from beyond that demonstrate in practical terms the respect an historically put-upon and exploited region requires.

This will likely involve nations having leaders who like Mia Mottley are willing to ask difficult questions about the future rather than holding on to the constructs of the past.

It suggests that the region’s political class need to do much more to seek and identify a realistic path towards the end of the rainbow, act in their national and their near neighbours’ self-interest, having better defined the opportunities and limits posed by physical location, economic dependency, indebtedness, critical mass, financing, smallness, the lack of congruent borders, security, and unresolved  transport issues.

The Caribbean has much to offer in relation to its fierce independence, its values, its vibrant forms of democracy, its freedom of expression, culture, and socially oriented identity.  Its young people need to be better engaged by Government, business, NGOs, the Churches, and schools at all levels in recognising this and defending its importance in a world that is rapidly changing.

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This is the last regular column I will write, having done so continuously for regional and international publication since 1995 at the then urging of two great newspapermen, Ken Gordon and the late Oliver Clarke. The aim has always been to look over the horizon and encourage debate on the basis that the challenges the region faces are for the Caribbean people alone to agree upon and resolve.

A moment now comes for reflection, the time to write in much longer form, and for giving in small ways that hopefully contribute something positive to the region’s future.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council

Previous columns can be found at https://www.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

December 9th, 2022

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own.

Photo by Matt Hardy

11th November 2022

The outcome of the mid-term elections in Florida suggests that US policy towards Cuba will continue to be driven by domestic political considerations, restricting serious bilateral dialogue. David Jessop asks why no one is discussing the danger of serious instability in the Northern Caribbean if  thinking about Cuba does not change.

Just over a week ago and for the 30th year running the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of a resolution condemning Washington for its continuing embargo on Cuba. The vote passed by 185 votes to two, with two abstentions. Those voting against were the United States and Israel. The two abstentions were Brazil’s then yet to take office new government, and Ukraine.

Despite this, there are few signs that bilateral relations will improve, or the embargo be significantly modified.

The decisive win in Florida by its Republican Governor, Ron DeSantis, who may well now decide to challenge former President Trump to be the party’s candidate in the 2024 Presidential race, recent US opinion polls, and the strong showing of Cuban-American candidates in the swing state make clear that Cuba will remain a politically potent issue in US domestic politics. That is, one limiting the ability of both Democrats and Republicans to respond rationally, despite the danger that the pressure cooker effect of the embargo may exacerbate internal economic tensions in Cuba with destabilising consequences for all in its periphery.

On the island, power outages, food and medicine shortages, transport difficulties, a lack of maintenance of critical infrastructure, price inflation, growing inequality for those without access to external financing from family and friends overseas, migration, bureaucracy, illegalities, and disaffection among many of the country’s young, continue to be exacerbated by the embargo.

Together they threaten unpredictable social, migratory, and geopolitical outcomes in a country in which conservative and more liberal factions within the Communist Party, military and government  appear unable collegiately to agree on how a more liberal socialist market economy might rapidly be created.

Despite this, much of the world’s media take little notice of the detail or substance of what is happening or being said in Cuba, trying instead to assess the complexity from one or another politically partisan perspective without ever having been there.

I observe this as someone who since the 1980s, has visited, has engaged in dialogue in Havana, Washington, London, and Brussels on economic and political issues in various professional incarnations, and who now edits the weekly publication Cuba Briefing which tries to convey apolitically and factually to an international audience the complexity of what is happening inside the country and beyond.

Seen from this unusually long immersive perspective, the Cuban Communist Party and Government now appears to be locked into  a race between their limited ability to deliver this year and next a modicum of economic recovery and address genuine social disaffection and the impact of US policy, while trying to respond on its own terms to geopolitical issues in ways that do not undermine national sovereignty.  

The immediate challenge for the Cuban government is quite literally and metaphorically proving to the Cuban people that there is light at the end of the tunnel. Post pandemic, the economy is slowly recovering but has been set back by constant power outages affecting both domestic and industrial supply, something unlikely to be fully addressed until sometime next year.

More positively, by the end of 2023 Cuba should again be receiving visitor numbers close to those it saw in 2019. If this happens it will ease both the country’s foreign exchange shortages and see a much-needed cash injection into the informal economy. The outlook for nickel is bright, opportunity potentially beckons in relation to bio-pharma production in other countries, while the production of gold  and the onshore recovery of oil also show promise.

Set against this, agriculture is in a parlous state with the emphasis now on self-sufficiency. The country  has embarked on the restructuring of sugar as a slimmed down fully integrated sector needing to shed workers and has seen its high value export tobacco sector seriously set back by Hurricane Ian. More generally, the country is highly indebted, and the combined effect of sanctions and foreign exchange shortages are resulting in higher costs for imported inputs for everything from oil to spares.

Government’s response to the consequent economic and related social crisis has been mixed.

At one level it has sought to activate the country’s natural entrepreneurial talent through limited private sector enabling legislation, allowing self-managed but partially constrained enterprises to be established; at another it has devolved aspects of fiscal, regulatory, and other forms of authority to provincial and municipal government in the hope that greater efficiencies and productivity might be delivered locally by what are still largely conservative subsidiary bureaucracies.

But what it has not so far dared do, seemingly for internal political reasons and fear of  US manipulation, has been to free the private sector and foreign investment in ways that Vietnam and China have demonstrated work for socialist economies.

At another level, the Communist Party is clearly concerned about how it relates to the country’s young who for the most part think differently to the older generation and are disinclined to respond to political exhortation. In a recently published commentary, Cuba’s President told a meeting of the Union of Young Communists a national strategy was required to ensure that young people feel able to achieve their ambitions in Cuba. This requires, he said, “rescuing values” with answers “not alien to young people.”  

A further indication of the difficulties facing government is the stated need to do more to restore confidence in relation to what the President recently described as “the illegalities, theft and abusive prices imposed on the population,” perpetrated, he said, by a new “caste” operating  “an underground illegal economy at prices few people can pay.”

Together, these and other domestic challenges explain the sense of national weariness – accurately portrayed by Elizabeth Dore in her recent book ‘How Things Fall Apart: What happened to the Cuban Revolution’ – particularly among Cubans who valued the now gone economic equality that the country’s revolution delivered.

The response to pent up accumulated frustrations could be seen in the widespread street protests of July 2021, the harsh reaction that followed, subsequent smaller sporadic events, prosecutions and pressure on groups seeking change and greater personal and artistic freedoms, and now-surging undocumented migration.

All of which comes as President Diaz Canel is seeking “a respectful dialogue” with Washington and “a narrowing of relations, regardless of the ideological differences”; the island has greater support across Latin America; US-Venezuelan relations are easing; Russia is studying a Cuban proposal on the provision of regular shipments of oil and derivatives, fertilisers, and wheat, possibly settled in Roubles; and a much closer economic relationship is being sought with the Eurasian Economic Union, China and Vietnam.

Regrettably, however, no one is asking what happens if US pressure succeeds, there is an internal breakdown of order in Cuba, people flee, and their relatives cross the Florida Straits to help them, triggering long-term instability and offshore opportunity for narco-traffickers or worse, resulting in further harm to the Cuban people. Or alternatively discussing whether the US – or Cuba – really want the island to again become economically dependent on Russia?

The absence of serious bilateral dialogue, the embargo, and US policy developed through the prism of Florida, provide no answers.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council

Previous columns can be found at https://www.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

November 11th, 2022

Photo by Louis Velazquez 

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own.

28th October 2022

After weeks of political chaos Britain has a new Prime Minister.  The challenges he faces are daunting if he is to save the UK from further economic decline and restore its credibility. David Jessop writes that the Caribbean should take note if it still has a strong long-term interest in a deeper relationship with Britain.

‘Indian son rises over empire. History comes full circle in Britain’, read the headline on India’s NDTV early morning news bulletin, indicating the fascination there and across much of the world that the UK, a country still struggling to find a post imperial role, should choose someone of British Asian origin as its latest Prime Minister.

In reality, Rishi Sunak’s appointment had nothing to do with his ethnicity. Instead, his election by parliamentary members of his own party rather than the Conservative party’s aging and often right-wing membership reflected the need for someone pragmatic, intellectual, and market aware, with the integrity to address the profound economic crisis now facing Britain. That is to say, an individual who might also bring together a hopelessly divided party, following an extraordinary period of political chaos and internecine political warfare.

After a disastrous experiment with an ideologically purist Liz Truss, and a discredited Boris Johnson, who still believes he should be Prime Minister, Mr Sunak is probably the least bad Conservative option to try to right the ship of state, restore a semblance of party unity, and in the eyes of his fellow MP’s overcome the huge swing in the opinion polls to Britain’s opposition Labour Party, Liberal Democrats and Scottish nationalists, including in seats once thought of as safely Tory.

At only forty-two, wealthy, and Britain’s youngest ever Prime Minister, Mr Sunak must now demonstrate that he has some understanding of the economic challenges facing ordinary voters, that he is not in thrall to one or another wing of his own party, and is in tune with working families and the country’s young whose vote will determine the outcome of the country’s next general election.

What is little understood is that his election, the political events of the last two years, and the more recent chaos are fundamentally a function of Brexit. Not of the 2016 referendum decision to leave the EU, but the failure of those on the winning side in successive Conservative governments to agree what Brexit was about, and how Britain as a middle ranking declining power should relate to a rapidly changing and realigning world. Put more simply, it was about the inability of three post-Brexit governments to explain in practical terms the meaning of what they meant by the expressions ‘Global Britain’ or ‘Britannia unchained’.

Multiple complex Brexit related issues still require resolution because important aspects of the basis on which the UK departed its neighbours still divide Britain’s governing party and public opinion.

For example, one matter with serious domestic and international implications, relates to the Northern Ireland Protocol, a central part of the post-Brexit trade arrangement between the UK and EU. 

Legislation now before the UK parliament, introduced by the Boris Johnson government, could override parts of the post Brexit trade protocol with the EU. If passed, it could not only negatively affect the UK’s trading arrangements with the EU, but also the future of Northern Ireland’s devolved government, the peace process there, and as a consequence, political relations with Ireland, the US, and the EU. Mr Sunak by some accounts may take a more conciliatory approach than some hard-line Eurosceptic Tory MPs whose support he needs on other issues.

Another flash point relates to migration and the extent to which the country should encourage workers from overseas to fill the UK’s many vacant posts in sectors from agriculture to hospitality. Most economists and some Conservative politicians see this as central to the UK’s future ability to grow its economy, but many Conservative parliamentarians and voters reject the idea out of hand, often for xenophobic reasons.

Equally divisive in the coming months are now unavoidable cuts to public expenditure and the introduction of new taxation to fill a £50bn (US$58bn) hole in the UK’s public finances at a time when inflation, forecast to exceed 10% this year, will hit households; related industrial unrest among unionised often low paid public sector workers; and Scotland’s elected government desire to press again for independence.

All of which is happening as the conflict in Ukraine is worsening; the UK together with the EU, the US, Canada, and allies in the G7 and NATO need to sustain a unified response towards Russia; and the UK must balance its relationship with China, its third-largest trading partner, with concerns about its assertiveness in relation to Taiwan and its record on human rights.

This suggests that Mr Sunak, who has little experience on the world stage, will need to work hard if he is deliver at the same time difficult decisions on the economy, while ensuring factions within his own party do not take control of his programme.

One indirect consequence is that the Caribbean, other perhaps than the Overseas Territories, will become invisible. While security coordination will undoubtedly continue, trade and investment will drift towards a focus on the region’s oil and gas rich states, what little direct development assistance is left will end, and the region’s climate change concerns may be paid less attention.

Beyond trying to restore economic stability, the challenges now facing Britain and by extension Mr Sunak and any future British Prime Minister of any party or coalition, are daunting. In the coming years he or any successor will have to try to restore Britain’s battered credibility while presiding over multiple difficult medium- and longer-term decisions if the country is to be saved from further economic decline.

Britain’s Government now has in its Cabinet and highest offices of state including the Foreign Office, Home Office, and International Trade, individuals from minorities, accurately reflecting by percentage the county’s multi-ethnic nature.

The next General Election in Britain is due at the latest in 2024. If the region still has any strong long-term interest in a deeper relationship with an ailing Britain, it should now be spending time identifying rising stars in its own diaspora able to wield long term influence within each of the UK’s main political parties.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council

Earlier columns can be found at https://www.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own

Photo by Jordhan Madec 

14th October 2022

Caribbean visitor arrivals in some countries are almost back at pre-pandemic levels. However, there are economic storm clouds on the horizon. David Jessop writes this should be the time governments and the industry come together to develop regional strategies to future-proof the sector.

No one should be in doubt. A toxic economic mix consisting of a war in Europe, surging inflation, slowing Chinese growth, a probable global recession, and a decision to cut production to increase oil prices by OPEC-plus, the cartel which now includes Russia, threaten to setback Caribbean tourism recovery.

Put more directly, some already relatively high-cost tourism destinations in the Caribbean may experience next year a significant decline as household budgets are stretched, particularly in Europe, as personal post-pandemic savings evaporate, and higher airfares and input costs for hotels make the Caribbean less affordable to middle and lower end long haul travellers.

The implication in the short term is that many visitors may choose to vacation closer to home. This will likely make the US and Canadian markets of greater significance, see a surge in the numbers cruising to avoid higher onshore costs, require new emphasis on encouraging airlift for visitors from Central and South America, and offer competitive advantage to lower input cost destinations such as Cuba and  the Dominican Republic.

Despite this, Caribbean tourism is unlikely to lose its long-term economic pre-eminence. As the pandemic proved, an absent industry spells economic disaster for most Caribbean nations.

According to regional research, hospitality is now linked to almost every aspect of the Caribbean economy. It is a huge employer of labour both directly and indirectly (43%), is the single largest generator of foreign exchange in sixteen Caribbean nations, is responsible for 53% of export earnings, is the sector receiving the most foreign direct investment, and by global standards has a higher percentage of GDP (33%) derived from tourism. It also indirectly supports in many nations governments’ ability to fund education, health care and social services through corporate related and other taxes imposed on visitors.

The pandemic was a watershed for the sector. It has caused many Caribbean tourism ministers to recognise the importance of consolidating past success and the need to restructure the tourism value chain on a regional and sub-regional basis to ensure that in the long term the industry’s economic benefits are sustainable, resistant to misfortune, and are spread more widely across the whole region.

Discussing this recently with Jamaica’s Tourism Minister, Edmund Bartlett, and the longer-term initiatives the region might take to future proof and strengthen the sector, he pointed to the exchanges that took place last month within the framework of the Ministerial Council of the Caribbean Tourism Organisation (CTO).

Describing the CTO meeting as the best he had attended, he said that the focus was on  the need to take a longer-term, non-traditional, and much broader view of what the Caribbean has to offer and to whom, the importance of creating new international alliances, and the need for a whole-of-government whole-of-region approach, bringing with it an industry sometimes at odds with public policy.

“Recovery cannot come without growth and to grow we need to diversify, both within our tourism product and the markets we expand into,”  he says.

Some of the solutions he and others propose have been well trailed in the media –  the need to develop further intra-regional multi-destination tourism as is the case in Central America; the harmonisation and development of single visa schemes to ease pan-Caribbean travel, especially by visitors from new markets; the creation of regional marketing, product development and investment strategies; joint airlift agreements; and much improved linkages between regional- and internationally-based airlines as part of a strategy to boost tourist arrivals.

But much less commented on, however, has been his view, also expressed separately by his counterpart in Barbados, Lisa Cummings, and Cuba’s former tourism minister, now Prime Minister, Manuel Marrero, that the future fortunes of Caribbean tourism lie in economic convergence between complimentary economies.

That is to say, the construction of a new tourism architecture that better integrates the industry and its offering in the north-western and south-eastern Caribbean and their subsets. This they believe could  result in collaborative strategies to jointly develop product and offerings attractive to new markets, enable economies of scale, and see the pooling of resources to achieve common goals, knowledge sharing, and skills transfer.

There are already signs of real progress in relation to new markets. The development agreement signed in May between Jamaica and Saudi Arabia is likely to be followed by one with Barbados with, it is hoped, both bringing new airlift able to open visitor markets in the Gulf, the Far East and Africa, and new investment.

Another intention, that could revolutionise Caribbean tourism if delivered regionally is a policy that could see all workers in the sector being able to share in the industry’s success.

Expanding on  comments made in a recent speech at a Caribbean Hotel and Tourism Association conference in Puerto Rico, Minister Bartlett suggests that those who work in the industry must “remain at the core of tourism’s recovery and future growth,” and have “tenure, mobility and portability.” To achieve this, he believes that tourism must professionalise, build human capital, and offer permanent employment. Central to this, he says, should be the linking of employees’ wages to the US Dollar the currency in which most hotels transact business, an issue that is under review in Jamaica. 

He is also promoting internationally the view that the Commonwealth and the Commonwealth Secretariat should be playing a much greater role in tourism development as a force for integration between Commonwealth countries. In a little noticed but thought-provoking speech delivered in Rwanda when Commonwealth Heads met in June, he suggested that a much stronger Commonwealth focus on the sector could see the global grouping recalibrate their economic relationship and encourage convergence.

The CTO’s Ministerial Council has asked Ministers Cummins and Bartlett to recommend a work plan that identifies how many of these ideas might be delivered. According to the body’s new Chair, the Cayman Islands Minister of Tourism, Kenneth Bryan, the two ministers will present a plan by January 2023 that could lead to a new sustainable growth agenda for tourism.  

Speaking recently about this in Barbados, Minister Cummins made clear that a far more comprehensive approach to tourism is needed to help grow and sustain the industry. She like Minister Bartlett sees tourism development as requiring a whole-of-government policy.

The opportunity now exists, perhaps for the first-time, for tourism to be led by Caribbean centric economic thinking. A new regional agenda for tourism would be a welcome step towards future proofing what has become the region’s primary industry.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council

Previous columns can be found at https://old.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own

Photo by Karl Callwood

As the traditional foreign investment partners look for better returns elsewhere, the region may have to turn to newer sources. David Jessop writes that the country now showing great interest in the Caribbean is Saudi Arabia, creating a potential alternative option to China’s continuing drive into the region.

There is no sign that the war in Ukraine will end soon. Instead, following significant losses on the battlefield, Russia is mobilising huge numbers of its citizens to fight in a conflict in which most do not wish to participate. In response, the west has made clear its military and other support in defence of Ukrainian sovereignty will increase.

To make matters worse, President Putin has threatened the use of nuclear weapons, leading the US to state that any such occurrence, even as a tactical demonstration, will be met decisively with what Jake Sullivan, the White House National Security Adviser described as “catastrophic consequences for Russia.”

Alarmed, China, India, and others including Turkey and Saudi Arabia, have distanced themselves from Russia, recognising the threat to global economic recovery, but hoping that at the right moment they might be able to play a role in achieving a negotiated peace.

This does not bode well for Caribbean economic recovery.

It suggests that by the year’s end the region may have to address a possible global recession, high rates of imported inflation, anaemic economic growth, declining visitor arrivals from markets not linked to the US Dollar, and delays to US and European private sector investment unless significant incentives are on offer.

Absent the region’s own entrepreneurs being willing to invest intra-regionally other than in areas in which they have discrete expertise, this will likely mean that to stimulate growth the region will have to encourage a much wider range of investment partners.

The implication is that these will be companies, private or sovereign investment funds, or state linked or state-controlled entities from China, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, India, probably Brazil and Venezuela, and possibly from some parts of Africa.

Although some Caribbean nations, following briefings by the US and others, are now less willing to consider some types of Chinese investment, China remains the region’s most important development partner.

It is for example engaged in and financing projects as varied as road construction in Jamaica and Barbados, co-investing in offshore oil exploration and large-scale infrastructural projects in Guyana, providing debt relief in Suriname, building a new airport in Dominica, and undertaking joint vaccine research with Cuba in a dedicated facility in China.

This diverse process will continue. In a recent statement, Qiu Xiaoqi, a Special Representative of the Chinese Government on Latin American Affairs, wrote that even though profound changes are taking place globally, China’s interest in the region remains undiminished. Beijing, he said, will continue working through its economic, development and security initiatives to deliver, as he put it, a sustainable shared future.

In late July, however, a potentially significant new Caribbean investment partner became evident.

For the first time ever, Saudi Arabian ministers, government officials and a genuinely high-level seventy-person private sector and institutional delegation participated in a regional investment forum in the Dominican Republic before travelling on to Jamaica and Guyana to meet government and business leaders to discuss specific opportunities.

Speaking at the Forum, during visits to Guyana and Jamaica, and when meeting with Caribbean Heads of Government at their July summit, the Kingdom’s Deputy Minister for Investors Outreach, Badr Al Badr, indicated that while the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Guyana may be the main targets, the Caribbean has been designated a “primary zone” for implementing Saudi Arabia’s 2030 national diversification investment strategy.

To achieve this, Dr Al Badr proposed that CARICOM Heads establish an institutional framework to develop the relationship, starting at the level of Leaders and Ministers and a focus on investment in tourism, agriculture, and energy.

In Guyana he noted his country’s “strong capabilities and assets” in energy and agriculture, and its interest in supporting Guyana and Guyanese companies in areas in which the Kingdom has expertise, possibly funded through the Saudi Development Fund and the Saudi EXIM Bank. In Jamaica he indicated a willingness to take forward high-end investments in agriculture and tourism. There was also optimism that the signing of bilateral air agreements may soon see flights linking the Gulf with the Caribbean, with one or the other country perhaps becoming a hub for operations into Latin America.

There is also the strong possibility that in the coming months at least one Caribbean Prime Minister may visit Riyad, and separately in November a group of CARICOM ministers are expected to do the same.

Less obviously there have been other Saudi ministerial and Saudi Fund for Development visits this year. These have been to Barbados, Dominica, The Bahamas, Cuba, and Belize, and in the last week in the margins of the UN General Assembly, Belize’s Prime Minister John Briceño, and the Saudi Crown Prince formally established diplomatic relations. In each case investment discussions have centred on infrastructure, tourism, and agriculture.

In parallel and less widely recognised, interest is also being shown by the oil and gas rich Gulf state of Qatar in energy extraction, allied facilities, agriculture and upscale investments in hotels and property in the Dominican Republic, Guyana, and Jamaica.

For many this diversification will be a welcome demonstration of the region’s now mature sovereignty. For others it will reflect a pragmatic response to much changed international relationships, while some who wish to see the region remain in the US’s ambit, will be less certain. There will also be those in the Caribbean who, as with China, are understandably concerned about Saudi Arabia’s human rights record.

Speaking in July in Washington at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies about the need for a rapid growth in investment flows, Guyana’s President, Ifraan Ali, took a pragmatic view. He suggested that investment whether from the US or China and by implication elsewhere, must be based on a country’s ability to move a partner country’s development path forward. It cannot, he said, “be aptly assessed in abstract terms” but must be based on “ensuring respect for fundamental principles, ensuring support for common values.”

How significant and how fast Saudi Arabian interest in Caribbean investment proceeds remains to be seen, but its expressed interest in the Caribbean presents an interesting potential counterpoint to China’s continuing drive into the region, and Washington’s hopefully sustainable recent rediscovery of the region’s needs.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council

Earlier columns can be found at https://old.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

September 30th, 2022

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own.

Photo by said alamri 

16th September 2022

The late Queen Elizabeth was widely revered for her sense of duty, her wisdom, advice, and the continuity she provided. As Head of the Commonwealth and as Britain’s monarch she represented selflessness and dedication rather than self-interest. She believed in the higher authority to whom she is now accountable. This and her ability to respond with great subtlety at critical moments at home and abroad meant that her real-world influence was significantly greater than most understand, and in a much-changed world unlikely to ever be seen again.

In 2018, Commonwealth Heads of Government accepted that as King, the then Prince of Wales, Charles, would succeed his mother as the head of what is now an organisation of fifty-six nations, the majority of which are Republics. Whether this arrangement will continue with his heir, or as some Commonwealth governments privately believe, see the role and duties rotate between Commonwealth nations, will emerge over time.

However, it will now be for Queen Elizabeth’s successor Charles III and perhaps more importantly his heir, Prince William, the new Prince of Wales, to adapt the role and find new ways to promote their vital endeavours relating to the environment, climate change, minorities, history, and the value of all faiths, in ways that re-educate and encourage change at home and in the Commonwealth.

An important element of this will be the way they present themselves in relation to the failure of many in Britain to understand their colonial history, and the unwillingness of some now in high political office to address rationally and publicly the issues and consequences, let alone accept that the Commonwealth is an association of equals.

In a recent editorial, The Guardian newspaper noted that while the monarchy has been involved in what it described as skirmishes with the government in relation to the Windrush scandal, deportations of undocumented migrants to Rwanda, and has acknowledged the legacy of slavery, it has not been able to change its post-imperial political delusion that the Commonwealth is an alternative to the European Union.

What has been striking in Britain in recent days, particularly in some parts of the media, has been the failure to comprehend that any decision to become a Republic, whether in the Caribbean or elsewhere in the Commonwealth, is a matter of sovereignty, and does not denote an end to a state’s continuing commitment to the Commonwealth or its Head.

Worse, it suggests that some in Britain still believe the country has some authority over nations that went to independence in some cases more than half a century ago. It is a view reflected in opinions previously expressed by some now senior figures in the British government who criticised Barbados’ decision to become a Republic on the basis that the island was in some way responding to the siren song of China.

That same incomprehension could again be seen on display following the passing of Queen Elizabeth in the media reaction to a comment made by Antigua’s Prime Minister, Gaston Browne, to ITV News about why the island was considering becoming a Republic. Unsurprisingly, he said it was the final step in becoming “a truly sovereign nation,” and was a matter for the people to decide and did not demonstrate any form of disrespect or hostility.

Subsequently, as my friend and fellow commentator Sir Ronald Sanders, Antigua’s Ambassador in Washington explained in a column, Caribbean nations wishing to become a Republic meant no disrespect to the Queen, or any diminution of their high regard for her worth, it “was simply a practicality.”

The two most senior members of Britain’s Royal Family understand this and have indicated that it is up to the governments and peoples of the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Commonwealth to decide who they want as head of state. There is also the sense that over time the ties that bind the Anglophone Caribbean to Britain and the monarchy may come to be shaped through a Commonwealth in which evolved relationships emerge.

Notably, when William, the now Prince of Wales, visited Belize, Jamaica, and The Bahamas earlier this year, he recognised that many in the Caribbean want a different relationship with Britain, and redress for past wrongs. During the visit he and his wife who are generationally different, worthy of respect, and live lives as near to normal as their status allows, made clear that their conversations in the Caribbean had “brought into even sharper focus questions about the past and the future.”

The “future is for the people to decide upon,” he said. “For us that’s not telling people what to do. It is about serving and supporting them in whatever way they think best, by using the platform we are lucky to have.” “Relationships evolve. Friendship endures.” He also accepted that “the appalling atrocity of slavery forever stains our history” and appeared to accept that he may not be elected head of the Commonwealth. His remarks were ground-breaking in that they suggested that the old order will not prevail forever.

In the Anglophone Caribbean its institutional arrangements and values remain close to those of Britain. There remain important ties through the diaspora, the overseas territories, co-ordination on many international issues, and for example real-time support on matters ranging from security to climatic disasters, but much else including trade and investment is diminished.

Quite rightly the Caribbean’s young people think little about Britain, other perhaps than as the former Imperial power.

This suggests that what may really matter far into the future is the reimagining of the Commonwealth as a free and equal association of nations that include Britain, as an organisation with a clear role, common purpose, and shared programmes wherever a commonality of interests exist. The likely decision by Australia in the coming years to become a Republic within the Commonwealth may help shape this.

There are indications that the new King and his heir may want to initiate a dialogue about the future with Commonwealth Government leaders, some of whom are privately sceptical about the organisation. In this they may be constrained by some in the new British government who are hostile to what they see as the liberal or ‘woke’ views held by the new monarch, fearing they might impede aspects of their political project, ‘Britannia Unchained.’

For these reasons, this should be the time when quietly, Caribbean Heads of Government, and where they remain, Governors General, should initiate with their counterparts across the Commonwealth a dialogue about what they hope for, and when it might be appropriate to launch such a conversation.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council

Earlier columns can be found at https://old.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

September 16th, 2022

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own.

Photo by Jiahui Mou 

Delivering Caribbean Governments’ ambitious plans to reduce the Caribbean’s huge food import bill will require significant levels of private sector investment. David Jessop writes that this may be difficult to achieve unless governments do much more to facilitate intra-regional investment.

Gervase Warner, the Chief Executive Officer of Massy Holdings, was direct.

Speaking in Trinidad at the second regional Agri-Investment Forum as Chairman of the CARICOM Private Sector Organisation, he said: “Food security has clearly become front and centre, a critical issue for our own survival. It is very clear to us we are not going to get help from our colonisers of the past, we are not going to get help from big developing countries…This is our problem for us to address.”

He told participants that if the private sector were to invest in agricultural production in Belize, Guyana, Trinidad and elsewhere, it would be possible to produce 25% of the region’s food and agricultural requirements by 2025, reducing the present US$4bn cost of CARICOM’s food imports by at least US$1.2bn.

His remarks come as conflict in Europe, sanctions, global decoupling, climate change, and drought are causing energy, fertiliser, and transport prices to surge, making the long-term economic outlook for food security challenging for every nation that is a net importer.

The Forum indicated that some progress towards achieving CARICOM’s 2025 food production target is happening in Jamaica, St Lucia, and Guyana, and that several other nations are seeking financing for agricultural expansion through a special Republic Bank facility.

More importantly, detail was provided about potentially game changing infrastructural and other initiatives being developed by a ‘coalition of the willing’ in the shape of Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad, and Barbados that if delivered will be developmental.

What the four nations envisage beyond the large-scale provision of agricultural land for food production by Guyana and Suriname, is the development of an intra-regional shipping service, the construction of a regional food hub in Barbados possibly linked to others in Antigua, Jamaica, St Lucia, and Trinidad, the development of value added agri-processing facilities in the OECS and elsewhere, and a proposal to use Suriname’s, and possibly Venezuela’s natural gas if brought ashore in Trinidad, to produce fertiliser for regional sale and export.

As a further step, discussions have begun with the Governor of Brazil’s landlocked agriculture-dominated northern province of Roraima about creating a regional outlet through Guyana for agricultural goods, while Suriname is to develop ideas as to how national and regional industrial policies in CARICOM might be created that horizontally integrate regional food production with manufacturing.

The Trinidad Forum also indicated that if this strategic southern vision is to succeed, it will require large Caribbean corporations to be convinced that such plans are commercially viable and executable.

Strikingly, however, what is emerging is a reluctance on the part of the regional private sector to consider intra-regional cross-border investments. This is despite some of the bigger players in CARICOM already being invested in agricultural ventures in Latin America.

Several Heads of Government speaking at the conference made clear that if the region’s own companies were unable to take advantage of the agricultural and related investment opportunities that now exist in Guyana, Suriname, Belize, and elsewhere, they would turn to foreign investors: in effect reversing the post-independence experience which saw foreign companies withdraw from owning and long-leasing Caribbean agricultural land.  

At the Forum, Trinidad’s Prime Minister, Keith Rowley, Guyana’s President, Ifran Ali, and Suriname’s President, Chandrikapersad Santokhi, all spoke about what Prime Minister Rowley described as “the resistance” of business to the initiatives that are being developed.

Prime Minister Rowley appealed to the region’s private sector “to change the formulae of trade” by using the time it will take to get crops into the ground to become distributors of local produce rather than commission agents for those outside of the region. He also sought to reassure the region’s small farmers that the drive for investment in large-scale agriculture for regional supply was not intended to displace or replace them, but to put in place systems that will help them too.

But this is far from being the whole story.

The economist Marla Dukharan, is of the view that the principal reason for the reluctance on the part of the regional and external private sector, whether in relation to investment in agriculture or much else, relates to how little progress has been made in addressing what she describes as the “dis-ease of doing business” in the region.

She suggests that recent acquisition, expansion, and consolidation trends involving the region’s non-tourism private sector indicate that investors continue to require “meaningful counterbalancing”, in the form of Government concessions to compensate for the costs and risk of doing business, and to make an investment opportunity sufficiently attractive.

She also believes that climate risks in the Eastern Caribbean, the smallness of market size, access to credit, and difficulty in penetrating any industry already dominated by a few big private players act as additional disincentives, as do formal foreign exchange restrictions in Barbados and The Bahamas, and de facto controls and risks in Trinidad that disincentivise investors.

Only in the case of Guyana, Jamaica, and the Dominican Republic does she see “more opportunity and possibility than costs and risks”.

Apart from this illustrating the urgency of addressing entrenched mismatches between public policy and private sector concerns, the regional private sector’s disinclination to invest in the Caribbean indicates the importance of accelerating the wider treaty and regional reforms necessary to stimulate the free movement of capital and labour.

Or put another way, if change does not happen, the newfound political will, vision, and desire to pursue competitive advantage based on economic complementarity now being shown by Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad, and Barbados will be frustrated.

The restructuring implied by the region accepting responsibility for its own food security is as great a challenge in its own way as that faced when preferential commodity arrangements with Europe ended.

Then, instead of linking EU support for the long overdue consolidation of commodity agriculture to a gradual transition into food production, Caribbean governments accepted by default the compensating rise of tourism and migration away from the land, embracing instead globalisation-enabled cheap food imports.

If for whatever reason larger entities in the regional private sector are unable to identify the commercial viability or successfully invest in Caribbean food security, others in China, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf with the wherewithal will do so, assuming responsibility for feeding the Caribbean.

Once again, holistic solutions and a long-term vision of a world that is changing are required; along with transparency and better explanations as to how governments intend facilitating intra-regional investment.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council

Previous columns can be found at https://old.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

September 2nd, 2022

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own.

Photo by Jed Owen

Photo by Jacopo Maia

Most Caribbean citizens want positive regional outcomes that touch their lives. David Jessop writes that if CARICOM is to demonstrate it has a future, its focus should be on rapidly delivering food security

In 2023, CARICOM will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. Plans are underway for what may be a year-long celebration.

Most governments, the secretariat, and regional institutions will no doubt use the events being planned to praise the achievements of the regional integration movement and its often-underrated role in achieving a single identity for the Anglophone Caribbean.

Others may not be so forgiving.

There is a growing body of opinion that as presently configured the regional entity is failing in its ability to resolve the Caribbean’s economic challenges. So much so that it is not hard to imagine that next year the response of the regional media, influential commentators, and many citizens will be less than enthusiastic.

To be fair, the regional integration process can point to significant recent achievements involving joined up and well executed actions relating to the pandemic, security, climate change, and for example, making the case internationally for changing the rules on concessional financing.

However, this is not the case when it comes to delivering reforms intended to modernise and make effective the functioning of the CSME, long discussed solutions to the now critical issues of food security and intra-regional transport, or the adaption of the regional business environment to create seamless Caribbean trade and investment.

Instead, CARICOM member states have shown themselves to be increasingly divided when it comes to putting in place measures agreed by Heads relating to free movement, enforcement of the Common External Tariff, and CARICOM’s adaptation of its decision-taking structures; seemingly unable or unwilling to overcome domestic constraints that hold back delivery and efficiency.

It was therefore scarcely surprising that when attending his first summit, the newly elected Prime Minister of Grenada, Dickon Mitchell, who represents generational change, warned about the need to do more, and talk less if a “transformative agenda” is to be delivered.

Seen from afar, the implication is that if CARICOM members states cannot implement the long overdue and now critical economic and financial reforms required to stimulate intra-regional investment, trade, and economic growth, the regional body may have reached the limit of its ability to deliver change.

The clearest indication of this and the frustration felt by some governments and the private sector can be seen in the growing number of hard to ignore overlapping intra-regional and hemispheric arrangements which have the potential to undercut CARICOM’s centrality.

Recent sub-regional arrangements amount to something close to a vote of no-confidence in the ability of CARICOM member states to deliver the agreed Treaty reforms that would make it better suited to the 21st Century.

In recent weeks it has become clear that governments at the southern end of the Caribbean are moving on their own to establish enhanced economic cooperation arrangements in ways that imply a two or more speed CARICOM based on geographic proximity, energy, and complimentary opportunity.

In the margins of the recent Heads meeting in Paramaribo, Barbados signed two enhanced cooperation agreements, one with Guyana and the other with Suriname because, in the words of  Barbados’ Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, “we have an obligation to work with people in our neighborhood.”

One, the island’s Strategic Dialogue and Cooperation Platform with Suriname – the St Barnabas accord –  establishes a basis for bilateral integration and closer cooperation in areas from agriculture to energy. The other, between Guyana and Barbados allows for the leasing of agricultural land in Guyana at concessional rates; the establishment of food terminals in both Barbados and Guyana for local, regional, and international use; a trade hub in Barbados; the creation of a processing facility to provide meat and fish products for the Eastern Caribbean; and the standardisation and harmonisation of sanitary and phytosanitary protocols and procedures.

All this is happening as Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados, and Suriname are moving towards creating a policy intended to protect their collective resources.

A recent analysis published in the Journal of Petroleum Technology noted that during the recent Suriname Energy, Oil & Gas Summit, Guyana and Suriname’s Presidents indicated they would soon unveil an approach that would see Barbados, Trinidad, Guyana and Suriname adopt policies that would protect their collective resources, see the development of Trinidad as a hub for LNG, and develop gas-to-power projects with links to locations as far West as Northern Brazil.

These and other strategic initiatives will rebalance influence within the Caribbean.

Despite this, most CARICOM nations have so far shown little appetite for signing let alone ratifying the variable speed protocol agreed in July 2021 which legally enables within the revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, smaller groups of CARICOM nations to develop, with the agreement of others, enhanced forms of sub-regional economic cooperation.

Elsewhere in the world integration mechanisms have updated their governance, foregone aspects of national sovereignty, established procedures that ensure delivery, created measures that guarantee accountability, transparency, and core financing, and have delegated executive powers to enable outcomes.

Successive reports since 1992, most notably by Sir Shridath Ramphal, and later by Bruce Golding, and more recently Avinash Persaud, have shown how CARICOM might have done the same. Unfortunately,  however, it continues to struggle to overcome what Dr Ralph Gonsalves, the Prime Minister of St Vincent, described in 2020 as “enduring problems” with its “design and practical functioning.”

A measure of whether CARICOM has a functional future will be its ability to deliver food security.

This means growing more by 2025, facilitating the entry of CARICOM workers to harvest what is grown, being able to move produce regionally by sea and air from Guyana, Suriname, and Belize, removing non-tariff barriers, and developing an accompanying industrial strategy which ensures, over time, food is processed in the region.

CARICOM heads meeting in Suriname fully recognised the need for each of these components to be delivered rapidly and in parallel, even setting very short timelines in their communiqué: a credibility test of member states commitment to action, and one that ought to be closely monitored by the region’s media.

What most Caribbean citizens want of CARICOM are positive regional outcomes that touch their lives. If the grouping is to demonstrate it has a future, it should focus in a limited way on what is most pressing. The ultimate test of its effectiveness, the ability to deliver a food and related transport strategy that benefits every one of its 19mn citizens in all fifteen member states, is fast approaching.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council

Previous columns can be found at https://old.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

July 22nd, 2022

Photo by Delfino Barboza

July 8th 2022

CARICOM Governments are hoping the US will lift its sanctions on Venezuela so that the region  can benefit from the resuscitation of its concessional oil initiative, PetroCaribe. David Jessop writes this will not be easy as Washington remains concerned about the spread of Venezuelan influence in the Caribbean. 

Venezuela is hoping to resuscitate its PetroCaribe programme. 

Against a background of surging global oil prices, the country’s gradual economic recovery, political change in Latin America, and a carefully crafted dialogue with the US, Russia, China, and Iran, Caracas is seeking to reposition itself as a swing energy state. 

Responding to less than well thought through western sanctions following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and their impact on the global price of oil, gas, fertiliser, food, and transport, it knows that the gradual freeing of its enormous reserves of oil could make a difference to many nations. 

Its actions suggest that if it can achieve an accommodation on sanctions with the US and EU based on the west and others urgent need for new, lower cost sources of energy through geopolitical diplomacy, it will be able to relaunch its Caribbean and Central American concessional oil initiative.

President Maduro clearly wants to see its early return. On June 29 he Tweeted in Spanish: “17 years ago Petrocaribe was created, with the integrationist vision of [Hugo] Chávez and Fidel [Castro], a mechanism for the energy security of the Latin American and Caribbean peoples. I am sure that very soon, we will recover the capacity of this instrument. It’s on its way.”

Although he made a similar comment in late 2019 which came to nothing, this time, more tellingly, the nature of his recent dialogue with St Vincent’s Prime Minister, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, and public comments by several Caribbean governments give credence to the possibility.

Returning home after a short hospital stay in Caracas and subsequent meetings with President Maduro and others, Dr Gonsalves said that there would be “a revival of PetroCaribe.” Venezuela, he told journalists, intended halving the debt of the other OECS PetroCaribe members and will offer fuel at 35 per cent discount to countries participating in the programme. In St Vincent’s case, he told the media, Venezuela had agreed to cancel his country’s PetroCaribe debt and offer other forms of support including fertiliser. 

Several other Caribbean nations including Antigua, Trinidad, The Bahamas, Belize, and probably Jamaica, are also in dialogue with Caracas about what the resuscitation of the programme could mean at a time when high energy prices threaten to derail hopes of post-pandemic recovery and create crippling debt servicing ratios.

Speaking at the end of June about how the programme might be restored, The Bahamas Prime Minister, Phillip Davis, said that at the Summit of the Americas he had raised the issue of sanctions, observing: “We are now seeing moves to ease sanctions so that Venezuela’s oil and other related products can be exported. Our voices are being heard.”  

However, when asked recently by the online platform Breaking Belize News about the possibility that Belize’s PetroCaribe debt might be forgiven, the country’s Foreign Minister, Eamon Courtenay, was more circumspect. He said that while no agreement can be reached because of sanctions, the threat of a PetroCaribe restart has helped bring Washington to the table.

Minister Courtney was quoted as saying: “The Americans realise the importance of Venezuela to the region….We have an issue with energy and there is a country that we are seeking to do business with that seems to be moving closer and closer to it. The United States realises that, listen, we need to sit down and have a discussion about this. If not, China will, If not, Russia will.”

And that is what appears to be happening.

Against the background of rapidly changing global relationships, the possibility of a recession in the West, and instability in poorer nations, Venezuela has been exercising its diplomatic muscle to exert geopolitical leverage through alliances with nations that the US does not want to see obtain a stronger foothold in the Americas.

On 4 July in Moscow, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister, Carlos Faria, according to the Russian government linked news platform Sputnik , indicated that Russia and Venezuela were close to a new understanding on resuscitating the country’s oil industry and other measures that could weaken western sanctions. It quoted his Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, as saying “We agreed to promote mutually beneficial projects in a host of areas, including energy, pharmaceuticals, industry, transport and military-technical cooperation.”  

In addition, during a visit to Iran early last month President Maduro signed a 20-year ‘cooperation road map’ covering oil, petrochemicals, defence, agriculture, tourism, and culture. At the same time China continues to support the survival and restoration of Venezuela’s much deteriorated oil sector and strengthen their long-term trade and defence industry relationship.

All of this is causing the US to reconsider its options through a cautious dialogue with the Venezuelan government. Senior administration officials visited Caracas in March and June in part, it was claimed, to discuss the freeing of US citizens held in Venezuela. However, President Maduro’s referencing of France’s call for Venezuela and Iran to return to “Western” oil markets to bring down energy prices, and his reiteration of Caracas’ willingness to resume oil shipments if sanctions were lifted, suggests there was much more to it. 

Despite this, the US remains cautious, and the Administration reportedly divided, no doubt aware of the strength of Congressional bipartisan support for sanctions, negative opinion in the swing state of Florida, and declining support in Venezuela and Latin America for its increasingly anomalous claim that Juan Guaidó remains ‘acting President.’

Instead, Washington’s line remains that talks between government and opposition should continue,  and sanctions relief will be tied to concrete progress. Notwithstanding, the US has lifted sanctions on the nephew of Venezuela’s first lady, allowed Chevron to renegotiate its license to operate in Venezuela, granted licenses to Eni and Repsol to resume oil-for-debt swaps with PDVSA, and discussed Venezuela’s possible return to oil markets. 

In the last few days CARICOM Heads have said that they will seek a dialogue with the US government to end sanctions on Venezuela to allow the region to benefit from the PetroCaribe initiative and to enable  exploitation of the huge cross-border natural gas field between Trinidad and Venezuela. 

How much success the region will have in obtaining a rapid US easing of sanctions is hard to gauge when Washington remains concerned about the spread of Venezuelan influence to its immediate south. 

Moreover, time is not on the Caribbean’s side. OPEC’s average oil price now stands at US$115 per barrel and its Secretary General, Mohammad Barkindo, has forecast that global demand for oil will increase up to 2045 while refining capacity will decline. 

It is one thing Venezuela forgiving debt and gifting fertiliser, but quite another creating a limited geographic mechanism able to ease payments for PetroCaribe members alone.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council 

Previous columns can be found at https://www.caribbean-council.

org/research-analysis/david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

July 8th, 2022

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own.

Photo by ActionVance

June 24th, 2022

David Jessop writes that although the recently held Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles opened welcome new windows of opportunity for the Caribbean, it indicated more generally that US influence in the hemisphere is waning.

The recently ended Summit of the Americas will likely be best remembered for the US decision not to invite Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, the chaotic unprepared way in which Washington tried to manage this, and the decision by some hemispheric leaders, most notably Mexico’s President, not to attend. 

While this may be unfair in terms of substance, it is a real indication that in the longer-term, US influence in the Americas is waning and that others sense opportunity for influence or division.

Despite this, the Los Angeles summit had multiple positive short to medium terms outcomes and saw a consensus among participants on several shared concerns. Agreements  were reached and declarations approved on migration, post pandemic economic recovery, health care and medical training, support for delivering clean energy, and on climate change. There was also an important commitment by the US to place new capital in the Inter-American Development Bank’s private-sector lending arm, IDB Invest, to catalyse private capital flows into for example, the development of 5G infrastructure and renewable energy.

For CARICOM and the Dominican Republic, the meetings opened a new window of opportunity at a mini summit held on 9 June with the US Vice President, Kamala Harris, which President Biden ‘dropped in on’. 

There, the US President indicated a level of commitment to the Caribbean not shown for many years. He said that it was his intention to intensify the US relationship with the region, telling Caribbean Heads and Foreign Ministers, “You’re critically important to us in every way.” He also emphasised that his Administration was exploring how the US might provide the means to “undo some of the damage done the previous four years, when [the region] wasn’t very much taken seriously.”  

This appears to mean that after years of neglect the US is willing to help address the overlapping economic issues of post  COVID recovery, climate change, food and energy insecurity, and lack of access to concessional financing. It implies recognition that helping resolve these problems are now recognised as being in Washington’s broader security and geopolitical interests.

Importantly, the new approach appears to accept that if solutions are to be found to these issues Washington will have to help develop ‘novel financial tools’ and find alternatives to the World Bank’s national income criteria which, up to now, has seen the whole of the Caribbean except Haiti graduated out of eligibility for multilateral concessional or grant financing. 

In addition, it was announced at the summit that the US and CARICOM are to launch a Caribbean Zero Hunger Plan which will provide US$28mn in new food security assistance to Caribbean countries. A Climate Crisis 2030 initiative will aim to bring the  US private sector, Caribbean companies, and international financial institutions together to develop blended funding to deliver infrastructure development and financing for renewable energy. Agreement was also reached on the need to further strengthen security cooperation, with a new emphasis on cybersecurity, cybercrime, countering small arms and people trafficking, and the creation of national action plans with tailored US responses.  

The intention now, the US says, is to form three high-level committees to develop “immediate and concrete, joint, and near-term solutions”.

If implemented rapidly these decisions represent significant commitments.

Despite this, it is hard to see why these long overdue initiatives had to wait for what was meant to be a summit of equals. Rather, the unfortunate impression created is that the event, the issue of who is invited and on what basis particularly in relation to Cuba, turned long overdue US responses into imperatives. 

The view held by some hemispheric commentators is that Washington is belatedly trying to bolster its credibility at a time when many of the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean are questioning its authority and seeking a more equitable role in policy development and decision making. 

In this respect, the comments made by Argentina’s President, Alberto Fernández, were blunt and to the point, arguing that “being the host country of the summit does not grant the ability to impose a ‘right of admission’ on the member countries of the continent”, and that the period in office of President Trump had been marked by  “an immensely damaging policy for our region”. He told President Biden, sitting just feet away: “It is time for those policies to change and the damage to be repaired”. Fernandez also attacked the Organisation of American States (The OAS) suggesting that “if it wants to be respected … it must be restructured by immediately removing those who run it.”  

This suggests that future summits are unlikely ever again to predominantly be a construct of US policy. 

If this summit’s planning under a Democratic President who genuinely cares about Latin America and the Caribbean, knows the world is changing, wants to engage in a partnership with the Americas, but is constrained by domestic political considerations and divisions within his own party, it is not hard to  imagine what will happen with any Republican successor.

Listen to what former President Trump and those around him are saying, or to Ron de Santis, the Republican Governor of Florida who aspires to the presidency, and it is clear that a future Republican President would again seek ‘coalitions of the willing’ and transactional arrangements in the Caribbean and Latin America in ways that create lasting rifts in already brittle relationships.

This is not lost on others. 

China’s confidence in its burgeoning economic and political influence in Latin America and the Caribbean can be seen in the post Summit criticism levelled  by Foreign Ministry Spokesperson, Zhao Lijian, who bluntly asserted: “the US needs to abandon its attachment to the outdated Monroe Doctrine and highhanded approach.” This same awareness of Washington’s slowly declining influence can also be seen in Russian actions and comments. It too believes that the Monroe Doctrine era is over and has said that its intention now is to deepen relations with Latin and Caribbean nations that have remained neutral on the war in Ukraine. 

President Biden told participants in the Summit “No matter what else is happening in the world, the Americas will always be a priority for the United States of America.”

It is however hard to avoid the conclusion that as in Colombia, Argentina, Peru and probably very soon in Brazil, social pressures will deliver more radical governments and  greater geopolitical competition resulting in fewer nations willing in the long term to adopt US thinking about the hemisphere.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council 

Previous columns can be found at https://old.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

June 24th, 2022

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own.


Photo by Jen Theodore

16th May 2022

David Jessop writes that differences over who is invited to the Summit of the Americas indicate that the time has come for Washington to find new ways to embrace change in the hemisphere, and for new institutions to emerge.

After a prolonged period in which Washington’s economic role and political influence in Latin America and the Caribbean has been unrivalled, fundamental questions are being asked about whether the development of institutions less dominated by the US, might better help shape the future of the hemisphere.

The trigger for the debate is the forthcoming Summit of the Americas, and whether it is intended to be an event at which US-oriented and led outcomes prevail; or one intended to encourage dialogue between equals, with mutually beneficial outcomes that apply to every nation in the hemisphere.

President Biden has said that the focus will be on “building a sustainable, resilient, and equitable future” for the hemisphere, and that “The ability of our democracies to close the gap between what we promise and what we deliver depends in no small part on what we do, together, to make it better.”

Despite this, the issues of parity, inclusivity, and outcomes that benefit all, are about to come to a head.

Questions have arisen as to whether the US, the ad interim host, will exclude Cuba and other nations in South and Central America when the meeting takes place in Los Angeles in June. Just as controversially, Washington may also try to seat the acting President of Venezuela, Juan Guaidó, who many Caribbean and Latin nations do not recognise.

Although the US has not yet sent out invitations – reportedly President Biden is thinking on the issue – the US Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, Brian Nichols when asked directly if Cuba would be invited, told a Colombian broadcaster: “No”, before observing “Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela do not respect the Democratic Charter of the Americas and therefore I do not expect their presence.”

In sharp contrast, Mexico’s President, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, speaking on 8 May in Cuba at the end of a working visit that took in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Belize, spelt out why he believes that the time has come to change the future of intra-hemispheric relations and its institutions.

“It is time for a new coexistence among all the countries of America, because the model imposed more than two centuries ago is exhausted, has no future or way out, and no longer benefits anyone. We must put aside the dilemma of joining the United States or opposing it defensively. It is time to express and explore another option, that of dialogue with the US rulers, and convince and persuade them that a new relationship between the countries of America, of all America, is possible,” he said in a little reported speech.

Mexico’s President went on to suggest that this would require a new political and economic vision involving “the replacement of the OAS by a truly autonomous body.” This, he said, might act as an economic integrator and mediator, “something similar to the European Union, but attached to our history, our reality and our identities.”

Without such an advance, and a treaty that encourages economic-commercial development, he suggested, the hemisphere would not be able to face strong global competition, and every nation including the US would experience relative economic decline.

Subsequently, President López Obrador said that he would not attend the Summit if the Biden administration excluded Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua – a position since taken by some other Latin states – making more difficult Washington’s desire for an agreement in Los Angeles on an integrated economic and social response to migration across the US-Mexico border.

For its part, CARICOM has yet to take a decision on whether or in what form member states will attend the summit but has already said it expects it to include the governments of Cuba and Venezuela. Although messaging varies between states, most stress they will wait until late May to see which countries are invited and then discuss a unified response.

The Ninth Summit of the Americas is unusually important as such concerns require the US to define the extent to which it accepts and can adapt to Latin America and the Caribbean’s now diverse intra-regional and international relationships, and in the region’s case, its close ties to both Cuba and Venezuela.

At best, the event could enable the Biden administration to provide a new perspective on what many in the US still regard as its own near abroad, detail how Washington might help stimulate sustainable hemisphere-wide post pandemic recovery and growth, and explain future US thinking about nations that are developing strong economic partnerships with China.

Vice President Kamala Harris and former Senator Dodd, the summit’s special adviser, have both made clear that Washington wants the focus to be on resolving issues such as migration, economic recovery and working together, and have said that Caribbean and Central American participation is critical to the Summit’s success.

Unfortunately, many of those in Washington and South Florida who influence US policy, to say nothing of former President Trump, lack an understanding of why relations with much of the hemisphere are poor, or the widespread frustration about threats, platitudes, and the slow delivery of past promises.

They have yet to recognise that future east-west competition will be about the inclusive deployment of effective economic support in areas that relate to the complex social issues that every Caribbean and Latin American nation needs to address.

The differences over the summit of the Americas indicate that the time has come for Washington to find better ways to embrace change in the hemisphere and to demonstrate that it genuinely accepts that the Monroe Doctrine and US hegemony no longer have relevance.

To write this is not to denigrate the globally significant role the US plays, the importance of shared values, geographic proximity, or downgrade the multiple ties that exist with the Caribbean as a whole. It is to suggest that in today’s much-changed hemisphere, US Administrations need to better understand why bending the OAS and other inter-American institutions to meet or reflect what in reality are often US domestic political objectives will lessen any likelihood of achieving a hemispheric consensus on solutions.

Unless Washington can demonstrate it is willing to accommodate hemispheric differences, its desire to be a ‘shining city on a hill’, in the Americas at least, will be eclipsed and its influence eventually wane.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at

david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

Previous columns can be found at https://old.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

May 13th, 2022

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own.

1st April 2022

Photo by Annie Spratt

David Jessop writes that Prince William’s sincere remarks made during his recent visit to the region highlighted the fact that many in the Caribbean want a different relationship with Britain, and redress for past wrongs.

Nothing better illustrates the divide that exists between today’s Caribbean and its past than two unfortunate images of Prince William and his wife Catherine in Jamaica; one standing atop a land rover after a military event, and the other having to greet children in Trench Town through a wire fence.

It was one of those rare moment when reality dawns even among royal sycophants that something is amiss, and we are all reminded how far the world and the Caribbean has moved on from the 1960s, leaving those in Britain who long for the past, trailing in its wake.

The royal couple who are generationally different, worthy of respect, and as near to normal as the rarefied environment in which the Prince has grown up allows, quickly recognised the dubious message the pictures conveyed.

The Prince, to his credit, made clear as he ended his visit to Belize, Jamaica, and The Bahamas, that his conversations had “brought into even sharper focus questions about the past and the future.”

Speaking about his role in a manner that those who advise him should have recommended he use in briefings and on arrival in the region, he said that the “future is for the people to decide upon.” “For us that’s not telling people what to do. It is about serving and supporting them in whatever way they think best, by using the platform we are lucky to have.” “Relationships evolve. Friendship endures,” the Prince said.

Just as importantly, he spoke as heir to the British throne about how “the appalling atrocity of slavery forever stains our history” and appeared to accept that he may not be elected head of the Commonwealth .

Although this is not enough to placate those in the region and Britain who want a more fulsome apology, a detailed discussion on reparations, and a rapid final constitutional separation, his remarks were ground-breaking in that they suggested in Britain that the old order cannot prevail forever.

Given the nature of royal protocol, it was in its own way as potentially a revolutionary moment as the recent acquittal in a jury trial in Bristol of those accused of pulling down a statue to the slaver, Edward Colston.

Equally startling were the comments made on camera to the couple by Jamaica’s Prime Minister, Andrew Holness, no doubt aware of his so far unfulfilled electoral promises about becoming a Republic. He made clear that the island was “moving on,” suggesting that “in short order” Jamaica intended to “achieve our full ambition as an independent, developed, prosperous country.”

It was a surreal moment when the Caribbean demonstrated very publicly to the British people and the world that it no longer saw the course of history in the same way as the former imperial power.

It indicated too, to paraphrase an editorial in the Gleaner, why the final act of repatriating sovereignty, should be seen as a declaration of confidence, celebrating Caribbean heroes, and why Jamaica has joined the rest of the region in demanding justice from Britain for chattel slavery.

Very soon the UK and other European governments are likely to have to respond to a Caribbean request to establish a formal mechanism to discuss restorative justice for slavery.

Speaking about this recently in her role as Chair of CARICOM’s Prime Ministerial Sub Committee on Reparations, Mia Mottley, Barbados’ Prime Minister, said that following a consultation with the African Union, a draft letter is now before Caribbean Heads. This will be sent soon, she said, to European nations responsible for colonisation and enslavement.

Noting that the world had moved on from when a reply to a letter sent to the UK in 2016 noted only a shared dark history, she expressed the hope that this time the response would be different. The Black Lives Matter movement, and the recognition, especially by younger people of the need for climate justice and a world “generally intolerant of poverty, inequity and discrimination,” she said, gave reason for hope that a “sensible and mature engagement on matters that are fundamental to the Caribbean” can take place.

Expressing the wish that an appropriate framework for such discussions can be established, and noting the development challenges the region faces, Ms Mottley observed that finding a solution was little different to legally righting any other wrong.

She is of course right, but the issue is so politically charged and often personalised that it is hard to see how in the UK, where the desire of many senior figures in the Conservative government to set the issue aside as ‘history’ and ‘wokeism’, might be resolved through negotiation alone.

Much will depend on how practical outcomes might be identified, the extent to which at the outset, political and public opinion can be brought onside, and how a case is built.

Morality and history is unquestionably on the Caribbean’s side. In contrast to the compensation of £20mn (the equivalent of US$22bn today) that plantation owners and others received in ‘compensation’ from Britain in the nineteenth century, Guyana, Barbados Trinidad, and Jamaica, despite their underdevelopment received little in support at the time of independence. Even when OECS nations individually ended their association, they received a ‘gift’ of £10mn (US13mn): a sum so paltry that even the British Minister present at the time told me, a young journalist, how shocked he was to discover the impoverished state of the country he had spent months negotiating with.

Such issues can now be linked directly to present indebtedness, vulnerability, the existential issue of climate change, at a time when the Caribbean has other friends in the world.

The issue of reparations, the optics of the recent royal visit, and the appallingly slow progress being made in relation to righting the wrongs experienced by the Windrush generation, cannot be divorced from one another, nor from Britain’s post-Brexit boast that it has values it wants to share with the world.

CARICOM Heads need to say this loudly, garner international support, and do more to carry public opinion in the UK.

This means Caribbean leaders speaking out, and having the UK’s regions, its opposition, more thoughtful ministers, the diaspora, and especially the country’s young, recognise how past wrongs might be practically addressed. The time has arrived for a structured dialogue that results in economic and social outcomes that benefit the widest number of Caribbean people.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council

Previous columns can be found at https://old.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

david.jessop@caribbean-council.org

April 1st, 2022

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own.

31st December

Photo by Tim Foster 

Caribbean leaders may soon find a new multidimensional east-west cold war added to the already complex economic, social, and political challenges they must address. David Jessop suggests that for economic reasons remaining non-aligned in the twenty first century may be hard to achieve. 

Imagining a better future for the Caribbean is not hard, but delivering it is becoming infinitely more complex.

In the modern world, in a non-biblical sense, a Caribbean promised land ought to be able to deliver stable economic growth from which all citizens benefit; significant progress towards the eradication of poverty and crime; a financing mechanism that provides for universal high quality free health care and education; future-facing infrastructure that supports development and investment; mechanisms that mitigate the now unstoppable impact of climate change; social mobility; a vibrant outward looking private sector; guaranteed food security; and the earned wherewithal to pay for such transformative change.

In most Caribbean states the list of dynamically interlinked issues requiring resolution are now mind numbing in their complexity.

To reach Camelot, the region will also have to address the societal issues which by example have for too long held women back. The region’s workforce needs to be reoriented and skilled to enable the development of higher value service industries, Caribbean integration requires new thinking to respond to global economic change, governments need to better define their red lines on sovereignty, and practical solutions are needed on issues from tax reform to reparations.

Unfortunately, past failures to address structural reform in real time or to factor in the marginalising impact of globalisation and post-cold war stability have not only made delivery difficult but the issues are about to become more acute.

The pandemic will significantly worsen indebtedness at a time when the Caribbean’s extra-regional partners have different priorities and cannot agree on how potentially supportive concessional financing might in future be provided. Although tourism will return and economies slowly recover, the underlying problems will remain, possibly becoming more complex if the region fragments in all but name into sub-groups with different outlooks and needs.

Even if this outline analysis is halfway correct, future success, as opposed to muddling through, will require new approaches to leadership and for the region’s politicians to provide a much stronger, coherent, and persuasive strategic vision.

There are of course Caribbean political, business, and other leaders able to reimagine the region and their country’s place in the world and who convincingly are trying to do something about it: Mia Mottley in Barbados is a good example, and there are others. However, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that if the region is to truly escape from its fraught history and identify what is necessary to deliver the future, the region’s political class and establishment needs to step outside its collective comfort zone, explain frankly the implications of the long-term problems the region faces, and commit to delivery and timely responses.

In the recent past the big issues that Caribbean leaders had to address were largely linear, finding a viable path out of preference, achieving greater equity in global trade, fostering tourism in ways that generate employment and taxation, delivering development in a region of social market economies: all issues capable of resolution by negotiation and individual intervention. However, in recent years, changes in the wider world have made Caribbean leadership an exercise in something akin to four-dimensional chess, requiring an awareness of the actions of third nations and parties whose objectives may be opaque and far from developmental.

In addition to the normal exercise of government that should enable citizens to see that their lives and livelihoods are improving, leaders and governments must now also respond to multiple other distracting events ranging from cyber and other security threats which in unprotected societies can hold whole nations to ransom, to offsetting national reputational damage driven by social media and the rolling news cycle.

Very soon, the region’s leaders may have to respond to strategically critical developments that will affect the Caribbean’s future economic and political trajectory.

On January 10, President Biden and Russia’s President Putin will meet in Geneva for three days. Although their encounter nominally responds to the dramatic pre-Christmas escalation of East-West tension in Europe and the presence of large numbers of Russian troops on the borders of the Ukraine, the outcome is potentially of great geopolitical significance. Their discussions in some respects mirror the division of Europe at Yalta in 1945 and the later Cuban missile crisis, while also  paralleling in some respects what could happen between the US and China in the South China Seas and in relation to Taiwan.

Over simplified, President Putin, who threatens a military intervention in the Ukraine and an energy crisis, wants a world in which the major powers agree spheres of influence, reach legally binding agreements on the location of military installations, and have NATO, the west’s mutual defence alliance, accept that parts of the former Soviet Union can never become members.

In contrast to Mr Putin’s desire for the issue to be resolved by one-on-one discussions with President Biden, Washington and its allies argue that the Ukraine and any sovereign state should be free to choose its own system and alliances, and that their actions should not be limited by the influence of great powers.

If as seems likely the emerging crisis is not resolved, and the US in all but name strengthens its influence in those parts of the world it sees as central to its own security, Caribbean leaders are going to have to think how they jointly and separately relate to the multipolar world that emerges.

The region’s overriding ties in relation to trade and investment, security, culture, continue to be with the geographically proximate US and to a lesser extent the EU and UK, but are balanced by the extensive long-term economic support that China has committed. Russia has what it now describes as a ‘strategic relationship’ with Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, and is deepening its economic engagement with the Caribbean and Latin America. In addition, all nations in the region have positive and mutually supportive relations with Cuba, as some do with Venezuela.

If as seems likely, a new and possibly alarming multidimensional cold war is in the offing, it could test Caribbean leadership and the response of civil society to the limits, as remaining nonaligned, which in the past has offered a way out of overtly taking sides, this may time be harder to achieve.

For this reason, it may be the moment for the Caribbean to consider how global confrontation might offer it leverage to obtain new, well financed, rapidly delivered support from one or another global actor. If this involves the region’s leadership shrewdly defining the nature of the Caribbean’s modern identity and needs and the way in which future alignments might practically help them deliver viable solutions to the problems the region faces, there is an outside chance the Caribbean might reach something close to the promised land.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council. The views expressed are his own.

Contact David with the following email: david.jessop@stagingcaribbean.wpengage.uk

Previous columns can be found at https://www.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

January 7, 2022

This is the last in a sequence of monthly commentaries taking a long view of issues affecting the Caribbean’s future development. The next regular View from Europe will be published on February 5.

Photo by USGS 

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the support promised by global leaders in relation to climate change will be delivered at a pace fast enough to help the Caribbean, if at all. David Jessop suggests that the region may need to consider other options. 

In a powerful speech at last month’s COP26 climate summit, Barbados’ Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, seized the day. 

In just eight minutes she captured the attention of her fellow leaders, demonstrated all that was wrong with the world order, and proposed three practical ways in which wealthy nations might deliver the quantum of support needed by climate vulnerable states.

For the Caribbean and low-lying nations around the world, climate change is existential. Time is no longer on the Caribbean’s side. Without support for mitigation and adaptation parts of the region could quite literally see much of their economic infrastructure destroyed, their populations displaced, and whole areas in low-lying nations disappear beneath the sea. 

What is required is the rapid mobilisation of funding. In Glasgow, direct, to the point, and factual, Prime Minister Mottley in concert with other Caribbean leaders gave substance to ideas first articulated by Jamaica’s Prime Minister, Andrew Holness, in 2018. At COP26 she put forward concrete proposals that went far beyond the empty rhetoric that pervades so many wealthy nations approach to climate change. 

Armed with a detailed understanding of what is required, she put forward three practical proposals that would in the medium term see the international financial system deliver, not just for the Caribbean but for the many at-risk nations in the Pacific, Africa, the Indian Ocean and elsewhere.

“Our world stands at a fork in the road; one no less significant than when the United Nations was formed in 1945. But then the majority of countries here did not exist; we exist now. The difference is we want to exist one hundred years from now,” Ms Mottley told world leaders present in the conference hall. 

In remarks that built on the region’s previously expressed need for international financial institutions such as the IMF to create a new basis for support for indebted states graduated out of concessional financing, she called for “new flexible development finance instruments which will support responsible, resilient and inclusive growth.” If the Central Banks of the wealthiest countries could find US$25 trillion to rescue their economies through quantitative easing, she argued, a US$500bn increase annually for twenty years in IMF special drawing rights (SDRs) ought to be possible to help at risk states address climate change.

The idea is that in contrast to the IMF’s proposed US$50bn Resilience and Sustainability Trust, a fund established by the wealthiest nations of the magnitude Ms Mottley proposed might, if targeted on the most vulnerable and available to the private sector to bid for, attract through low borrowing rates counterpart private capital delivering carbon-cutting investments.

In Glasgow, Barbados’ Prime Minister also stressed the need for a loss and damage fund on the basis that the cost of extreme weather events of the kind the Caribbean is already experiencing cannot be met out of insurance premiums. Instead, she proposed a US$70bn fund available only to countries that had incurred a loss of more than five per cent of their economy through a climate-related disaster.

Ms Mottley also argued that because commitments made on mitigation by large carbon emitting nations were based on technologies yet to be developed, such rhetoric was at best reckless and at worst dangerous. Since this pointed to the likelihood of a 2.7°C rise in temperature by 2023 rather than the 1.5°C governments had committed to, the Caribbean and other most at-risk nations would in the real world have to adapt rapidly. This meant that fifty per cent rather than 25 % of agreed financing should be spent on adaptation. 

In the end it was only the proposal relating to the IMF’s SDRs that made it to the final COP26 pact in the form of ‘encouraging’ multilateral institutions to consider ‘how climate vulnerabilities should be reflected in the provision and mobilisation of concessional financial resources and other forms of support, including special drawing rights.’

Despite the positive political engagement of  the US, the EU, the UK, and others with the Caribbean’s cause, it is hard to avoid the conclusion reached by Antigua’s Prime Minister, Gaston Browne, 

that “beyond the incremental gains, COP26 was merely a PR exercise, a great PR platform”. Worse, the absence of leaders from Russia and China and the desire of major carbon emitters including Saudi Arabia, Japan, Australia, and India, to slow the pace of change made clear that small vulnerable states around the world face a challenging future.

While the progress made may have been incremental – some might say attritional – time is running out for the Caribbean. If as seems likely, instead of the world moving to limit warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels by 2023 and warming moves above 2°C, the region will need to move rapidly to harden its infrastructure to avoid the additional post pandemic economic burden of unpredictable catastrophic losses. 

Beyond the multilateral financing initiatives being proposed by the Caribbean this would appear to require the rapid exploration of recently outlined programmes for infrastructure support that the US, EU, UK, and others in the G7 intend rolling out in implied competition with China, if that is they are prepared to find a way to address the inequity of having graduated the region out of concessional funding.

If they do not, the answer may lie elsewhere: in exploration of whether China’s commitment to Africa to invest in wind power, solar and renewables made at the just ended Forum on China–Africa Cooperation in Senegal, will be extended to the Caribbean. 

Other pressing environmental issues also suggest the need for a new narrative.

In the longer term, strategic consideration needs to be given to how and uneven global energy transition and success or failure in addressing global warming might alter international relations, and the location of wealth and influence, including in the Caribbean. While closer to home, major hydrocarbon finds, growing environmental activism, the need to establish a new sustainable balance between tourism, agriculture, and extractive industries in the region’s land and sea spaces, and the protection of the region’s biodiversity, all require a better and more joined-up approach.

The Caribbean will of course not give up fighting for what is right. As a no or low carbon emitter it occupies the moral high ground, enabling unanimity between leaders.

Unfortunately, the region has no power to enforce outcomes. If the international rhetoric of the last twenty-six-years is not translated into action, the Caribbean remains in danger of drowning in others unfulfilled promises.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at

david.jessop@stagingcaribbean.wpengage.uk

Previous columns can be found at https://www.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

December 3rd, 2021

This is the fifth in a sequence of six, monthly commentaries taking a long view of issues affecting the Caribbean’s future development. 

Addressing Caribbean security requires an understanding that without sustainable resources and Caribbean led socioeconomic reform the region’s tenuous stability could quickly deteriorate. David Jessop writes that the Caribbean ought to better articulate why in different ways it requires the support of multiple international partners.

In mid-November, a little noticed virtual meeting took place. It considered in the round the security threats that the Caribbean will face in future. It pointed not just to the obvious in the form of the enemy within – those involved in criminality, organised crime, and corruption – but considered an unusually wide range of other factors.

The US-led event was organised under the auspices of CRIOC (the Caribbean Region Information Operations Council), a multinational security partnership established in 2013. The body coordinates what it euphemistically describes as ‘information related capabilities’ between Caribbean security forces and those of the US, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Canada, and from time-to-time other countries with a security interest in the region.

As one might expect, the discussion focussed in part on what a report on Southern Command’s media platform, Diálogo, described as ‘the exceptionally high level of violent crime and corruption in some countries, the increasing overlap between organised crime and terrorist networks (Islamic State-affiliates, Hezbollah and narco-terrorism), and the disintegration of Venezuela’, which it portrayed as ‘a mafia-state exporting instability to other countries in the region’.

But significantly, the major emphasis was on how these continuing challenges may fuse with broader instabilities caused by climate change, the economic and social damage caused by the pandemic, the lure of the vast new oil and gas finds in the Guianas, ethnic conflict, the region’s changing international relationships, and the role played by offshore financial centres. 

Unsurprisingly perhaps, given the meeting’s provenance, much of the reported long-term concern related to the perceived security threat posed by Chinese investment, the implications of this for Caribbean indebtedness, and the political leverage it might offer domestically and in international fora. The meeting reportedly also considered Russia’s growing role in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, what were described as its ‘increasingly effective disinformation campaigns’, and its ability to ‘light fires in the US near abroad’. However, less clear was whether the cyber security and migratory challenges the region faces were also considered.

According to Diálogo, the meeting indicated that the security threat in the Caribbean is ‘evolving rapidly’, with new threats emerging, compounding old ones. Despite the region being the US’s third border, it reported, the Caribbean had not received as much attention as borders with Canada and Mexico, so ‘has to be made a much higher security priority in the future’.

Although there is real value in undertaking a broader analysis of Caribbean security, it is hard not to see CRIOC’s published outcome as a particularly US-centric response to the changing world order, and in some respects at odds with the more nuanced geopolitical approach that most Caribbean governments have adopted.

Put another way, when it comes to responding to the threat, security professionals by now ought to be able to demonstrate greater subtlety and nuance given the region’s clear desire to balance its international trade, and economic and political relationships between the US, China, Europe, other nations in the hemisphere, and countries further afield. 

Moreover, it is unclear from the report whether the meeting considered whether any nation or group of nations is prepared to support in an holistic way all that it will take to respond to the root causes of the now decades-long exponential growth in criminality in once well-ordered and peaceful Caribbean societies. 

For years now, individuals and organised crime have been corrupting governance, business and daily life in the Caribbean, threatening stability by preying on underdevelopment. This had led to the application of illicit gains to seemingly legitimate commercial activities, the skewing of electoral politics, and the emergence of some who appear beyond the rule of law. So pervasive, insidious, and threatening has the role of criminal godfathers become in some Caribbean nations that Caribbean Governments and more importantly individuals, the media, the Church, and the academic community are no longer willing publicly to confront the menace.

Long term success in addressing narcotics trafficking, money laundering, extortion, gun crime, kidnapping, robbery with violence, cybercrime, let alone the alarming linkages emerging between those involved in crime and international terrorism, is about much more than suppression or displacement.

This is because the origins lie in the Caribbean’s geographic location; its relative economic underdevelopment; unacceptable levels of unemployment; the absence of sustainable economic growth; the consequent presence of significant pockets of social deprivation; and the opportunity these factors all present to those with criminal intent able to command sums often larger than national budgets.

More prosaically, in the short to medium term, achieving Caribbean security means addressing social disaffection among youth; reforming weak, underpaid and sometimes corrupt law enforcement agencies; ending the destabilising practice of deporting criminals from the US; halting people trafficking through legally managed migration; recognising the dangers inherent in encouraging instability in Cuba; and in stemming the cross-border smuggling of arms between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, and Colombia and Venezuela, routes that facilitate shipments into the rest of the region.

Helpfully, for geostrategic reasons, the Biden Administration has accepted the connection between security in the hemisphere and socio-economic development. It has begun to pursue an approach in conjunction with US business that aims to address some of the underlying causes while cementing economic ties, business relationships and political alignments. However, there is no guarantee of bipartisan sustainability. The febrile political climate within the US, and the possibility that in 2024 there will be another Republican administration suggests that the security relationship with the Caribbean may again become transactional, requiring political acquiescence.

By contrast, China’s response is not overtly security driven. Close to achieving global economic equivalence to the US, it knows that opportunity will follow and that it has a political system that can sustain over decades a hard to match approach that responds to small states’ need to rapidly upgrade infrastructure to support economic growth. Consequently, it can accept with some reservations the multifaceted, balanced relationships of the kind now being pursued by the Dominican Republic and Guyana, which involve US security support alongside large-scale Chinese investment and trade. 

Addressing the complex longer-term nature of Caribbean security does indeed need the US and its allies to take a much greater interest in the region, but this should not be through the optic of US security alone. It requires an understanding that without sustainable resources and Caribbean led socioeconomic reform the region’s sometimes tenuous stability could quite quickly deteriorate further. 

What is missing is long-term Caribbean-led thinking about how best to co-exist in a world in which new security threats are emerging, and two dominant, philosophically different powers are actively vying for supremacy.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at

david.jessop@stagingcaribbean.wpengage.uk

Previous columns can be found at https://www.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

November 5th, 2021

This is the fifth in a sequence of six, monthly commentaries taking a long view of issues affecting the Caribbean’s future development.

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski

David Jessop believes that the recommendations of the CARICOM Commission on the Economy represent the region’s last best hope of achieving the re-engineering required if the Caribbean is ever to compete globally as a bloc.

Some years ago, the then Prime Minister of Barbados, the late Owen Arthur, told me that unless regional leaders could agree on how to achieve economic parity between CARICOM’s member states, a viable Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) might not be attainable.

During a lengthy exchange he suggested that to overcome the differences in the weight, size and performance of Anglophone Caribbean nations, CARICOM’s members needed to have greater political will. The meant, he said, adopting, implementing, and sustaining measures that would rebalance relationships, enable intra-regional capital flows, and stimulate economic complementarities. Without this, he said, it would be hard to make competitive  and economically secure a geographically fragmented region.

More than two decades on, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Caribbean’s ‘big fish small fish’ issue so concerning Prime Minister Arthur may never be comprehensively addressed. 

Despite having received over decades common-sense proposals that could enable the Anglophone Caribbean as a group to adapt to the external forces shaping economic globalisation and regional and international relationships, CARICOM governments do not appear to have the will or strategic patience required. 

Instead, fear of being left behind by neighbours, petty nationalism, and the domestic political consequences of voters seeing more economically viable neighbours achieving greater economic influence, suggests that the region as an entity is unlikely to match the pace of global economic change. 

Almost all that is needed to remedy the Caribbean’s economic malaise is encapsulated in an address,  ‘A new Approach to Regional Development- the Growth Agenda’, delivered in Jamaica in early 2019 by Barbados’ Prime Minister, Mia Mottley. 

Addressing the Jamaica Stock Exchange’s annual conference, Ms Mottley argued that the region had failed in the 1980s and 1990s to scale up regionally to ensure competitiveness, adjust its smallness in the face of trade liberalisation, recognise the broader implications of climate change, or prepare for changing global security requirements related to financial flows. Consequently, she said, emerging economies were leapfrogging the region and achieving higher levels of growth.

Her solutions remain wholly relevant, today and for the future. 

Caribbean growth, Barbados’ Prime Minister said, could be mobilised. To achieve this a CARICOM-wide single integrated regional capital market and accompanying measures were needed to liberate intra-regional private sector investment and citizen saving. She also advocated the parallel delivery of higher minimum standards of education and skills; free regional movement of all labour; bringing skilled migrants into the region; renovating the region’s largely staid banking model; broadening the basis for economic ownership; and prioritising CARICOM states needs in relation to food security, intra-regional air and maritime transport, and ICT. 

Since then, Dr Avinash Persaud’s CARICOM Commission on the Economy has added depth to each of these ideas, putting forward genuinely radical proposals on resuscitating the regional integration process in ways that circumvent the lack of funding and absence of political will.

Importantly, the Commission proposed spurring regional development on the basis that groups of member states implement and develop what is agreed regionally at different paces, with a minimum of five countries or a third of member states taking  proposals forward, so that a two or more speed CARICOM might gradually become a genuine single market and economy.

It linked the obvious and focussed on the practical. Although distant from the high ambition of the Treaty of Chaguaramas, the report offered a way out of the present implementation impasse by linking its alternative model of integration to improved connectivity, education, a larger regional role for the private sector, genuine free movement, and a changed approach to inter-regional transport. 

The report is probably the region’s last best hope of achieving the economic re-engineering required if the CSME is ever to achieve the cohesion and purpose necessary to compete globally as a bloc, because  realpolitick has already begun to define future outcomes. 

For those who care to look beyond the rhetoric, the Caribbean’s economic future is being reshaped.

Guyana, which according to the IMF will this year alone see its GDP grow by 16.4% and by 2024 achieve export earnings of  US$8bn, is exploring common economic projects and security arrangements with Suriname, French Guiana, and Brazil, likely making the Northeast corner of South America of global economic significance, offering new opportunity to a diversified and better integrated Trinidad. 

Jamaica, The Bahamas, and beyond CARICOM the Dominican Republic, are drawing closer economically to the US and China, with analysts forecasting high rates of post-pandemic growth. Elsewhere, the OECS continues to deepen its subregional integration process, consolidating its already close ties to Barbados and Trinidad, while Belize’s economic future lies with its neighbours, and most of the Caribbean overseas territories have long been globally integrated. 

Central to this process of change is the way in which thinking in the region’s private sector is evolving, and the changing focus of foreign investment flows. 

Despite multiple impediments, conglomerates like Massy Holdings, Goddards, Guardian Holdings and Grace, are successfully cross-listing, investing in or engaging in productive ventures across the region. At the same time, vast sums are likely to be invested by foreign entities in multiple sectors and infrastructure in the Guianas, while elsewhere the external focus is country specific, on ports, logistics hubs, and near shoring rather than regional opportunity.

Change can also be seen in youthful knowledge and skills-driven small and even micro enterprises that have recognised that the size of a domestic market is irrelevant if through connectivity they can join with others in the region and overseas to market services from research to teaching and animation. 

If CARICOM’s leaders do not act, these geopolitical and real-world developments threaten to outpace the CARICOM Commission’s recommendations, which appear to have been kicked into the long grass by some Governments, making it more likely that some nations will move pre-emptively to deepen economic relations, based on geography, politics, similarities, and shared objectives. 

Just over a week ago Sir Ronald Sanders, Antigua’s Ambassador to the US, argued in his column that the time had come “to re-think the integration project”. “Maybe if a smaller group could achieve success in greater cohesion and coherence the others will recognise value and act to be a convinced part of it. But pretence that all is well helps none”, he wrote.

As Sir Ronald suggests, the time has come to reimagine both CARICOM and the CSME. If member states are unable to do so, the future will be new and overlapping economic relationships that address national and sub-regional development challenges in real time. If that happens it will undercut and ultimately result in the demise of regional unity, lessening the region’s place in the world.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at 

david.jessop@stagingcaribbean.wpengage.uk

Previous columns can be found at https://www.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

September 3rd, 2021

This is the third in a sequence of six monthly commentaries taking a long view of the Caribbean’s future

Photo by Callum Wale

In this, the second of six monthly commentaries taking the long view of change in the Caribbean, David Jessop suggests that if CARICOM is unable to deliver a modern single market and economy and drive transformational reform, others from outside the region will exploit this and try to define its future. 

A few days ago, the President of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, delivered a speech marking the anniversary of the birth of Simon Bolivar. In it he argued that the time has come for “a new coexistence among all the countries of the Americas” as “the model imposed more than two centuries ago is exhausted”. “It has no future or way out, it no longer benefits anyone”, he said.

Speaking in Mexico City, he called for an alternative, new economic and political vision of Latin America and the Caribbean, able to withstand the competing pressures of both the US and China, economically and commercially unified, globally powerful, and able to compete with any country or region in the world. 

He spoke forcefully about the dominant role of the US, China’s growing economic weight in the hemisphere, Washington’s desire to exercise control through the OAS, and in a carefully chosen choice of words, the importance to the hemisphere of Cuba’s defence of its sovereignty. 

His remarks should cause the Anglophone Caribbean to reflect, and to think more about where in the long-term its discord and failure to respond to changing economic and political realities are leading.

A unified and economically integrated Caribbean could be a significant intellectual and moral force within the Americas. Unfortunately, far from embracing proposals that could create greater unity and identity, CARICOM Heads of Government continue to push back against restructuring the CSME, demonstrating their seeming intention to do little more than allow regionalism and integration to attenuate to the point of irrelevance.

So much so, that it is increasingly hard to avoid the conclusion that CARICOM is moribund, its largely post-colonial construct no longer fit for purpose, and with some notable exceptions such as public health, climate change, and security, is unable to move forward practically at the pace at which the world around it is changing. 

Forty to sixty years on from independence, the Caribbean as a whole ought to have become a modern vibrant unity; and pandemic aside, one that is strong, making real economic progress, speaking with a single voice, supported by an executive authority to which clearly defined areas of decision making have been ceded, with strong regional relationships that cross the divide of language and dependency. 

Having written about and been deeply involved in practically supporting the region’s development for half a century, it is hard not to conclude reluctantly but objectively, that significant further progress on integration now seems unlikely.

If this is so, the probability is that in the coming decade, new extra-Caribbean relationships will form that lessen the post-independence attraction of CARICOM and regional unity. 

The implication is that these will gradually draw some of the nations of the region much closer to Latin partners in South and Central America that are geographically proximate, economically complementary, and offer alternative opportunity; a process stimulated by those nations in the region that choose  greater benefit from their proximity and affinity to the US. 

This drift away from the centre is already underway. It can be seen variously in the recent actions of Guyana, Trinidad, Jamaica, Belize, the Bahamas, and some of the nations of the OECS in their pursuit of options which for economic, political, or pragmatic reasons will ultimately weaken, even end regionalism in all but name.

This process may be unstoppable.

National economic self-interest and the need to respond to events have all but replaced a commitment to modernisation and the rapid delivery of common responses, causing the implementation of vital reforms such as those envisaged by the CARICOM Commission on the Economy to stall, making an already fragmented and economically unequal region less likely to coalesce. 

Economic gravity in the form of proximity, the cost of doing business, poor transport links, and alternative national priorities are seeing constructed the extra-regional intra-hemispheric and global relationships of the future, mitigating against strengthening a common Caribbean identity.

Hydrocarbons and minerals and other forms of wealth creation are dispersing the region’s economic centres of gravity and dissipating its influence. In a reflection of this and the region’s strategic importance, external parties including the US, China, India, the Gulf States, and Russia, are seeking an ever-increasing role in defining the region’s future based on their own economic, strategic, and even military priorities, altering inter-regional relationships.

Security threats in all their forms have passed beyond the ability of the Caribbean to confront. Physical defence, narcotics interdiction, intelligence gathering, cyber security, and the willingness to confront corruption and organised crime, require alliances with one or more external partners that share the same values, but paradoxically such relationships have demonstrated the power to drive nations apart if ‘coalitions of the willing’ are called on to back hemispheric or international security concerns. 

In addition, CARICOM’s outstanding intellectual and analytic skills are being dissipated. The absence of a willingness to genuinely enable free movement or a policy that might enable new skills to be brought into the region to generate faster intra-regional corporate growth, suggests that future demographic limitations, smallness, and shortages of future-facing skills will encourage debate rather than delivery, and the departure of the most able to take up meaningful opportunity elsewhere.

By contrast, the Dominican Republic, Cuba if it can modernise, de-bureaucratise and liberalise delivery of its socially oriented economy, parts of the French Caribbean, and some of the Overseas Territories, will continue to grow their economies, demonstrating that global smallness, vulnerability and even isolation from nearby markets may not necessarily be an impediment to growth.

There is much more to be explored about these and other equally divisive trends. Social media, post-truth politics, the sustainability of democratic values, and engineered events in and on the periphery of the region, could for example also change the region’s trajectory.

Of these the most potent, as Mexico’s President implied, is Washington’s continuing desire to control what is sees as its hemisphere, and the implication of the simple but powerful question posed recently by the conservative Republican Congresswoman, Liz Cheney, about the future of US democracy: “Will we be so blinded by partisanship that we will throw away the miracle of America?”.

Unless the Caribbean as a region is willing to look over the horizon, achieve transformational economic and political reform, in ways that enable a fuller embrace of Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, and recognises where its three-decade-long failure to implement change will lead, the dispiriting probability is that before long this will allow others to shape the region’s future, and its nations drift or be pulled apart.

This is one of a sequence of six commentaries taking a long view of the Caribbean’s future.

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at 

david.jessop@stagingcaribbean.wpengage.uk

Previous columns can be found at https://www.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

July 30th, 2021

The next column, which is now monthly, will be filed on September 3, 2021

Photo by frank mckenna 

In this the first of a monthly series of columns, David Jessop identifies some of the issues the issues and themes that may determine the future trajectory of the Caribbean.

Today a younger generation of Caribbean women and men have begun to challenge many of the assumptions that exist in and beyond the region. They are in government, business, academia, the social sector, and the media. They are becoming more assertive, independent of the outside world, seeking change in the region’s largely inherited post-independence establishment structures.

Unfortunately, the political process and the creaking machinery of most governments is unable to move at the speed and global connectivity of the open world that they inhabit.

Worse, intra-regional disputes, and as the region’s history with the Trump Administration has shown, it has become easy to exploit the endemic weaknesses, and economic problems most Caribbean nations suffer from, delaying delivery, and more recently dividing the region on ideological grounds.

As this column has previously suggested, by virtue of its location, smallness, and need for development, the Caribbean will continue to struggle to be the mistress of its own destiny unless it can achieve unity of purpose, new thinking, a clear vision, and real time execution. 

After working with and writing about the Caribbean in multiple incarnations since the 1970s, the objective now is to take a long view, ask questions about future alignments, and suggest the issues and themes that may determine the trajectory of the Caribbean in the rest of the twenty first century.

In the coming months, the first commentary will reflect on the changing location of economic power and influence in the region, the very real possibility this may in future change the way Caribbean states and businesses respond to one another, and the likelihood this will cause nations in the periphery and beyond, to reprioritise their relationships. 

The Second, will consider what might be described as the ‘big fish-small fish’ problem, involving countries that say they desire economic integration but are torn between the imposed parameters of existing institutions and logic when it comes to determining optimum regional economic relationships, and size related opportunity

The third relates to the alarming question of the Caribbean’s growing social deficit. Brought on by years of indebtedness and political mismanagement, a failing education system is continuing to foster inequality, and not enabling young people to obtain the skills relevant to the connectivity, services, and global opportunity that will in future enable even the smallest nations to succeed.  

Fourthly, it is impossible to consider the future without addressing the extent to which ‘the enemy within’- that is, those involved in criminality, organised crime, and corruption – if unchallenged, will influence the future and may skew the region’s prospects, its democracy, and the benefits of accelerated economic growth.

Fifthly, this column will consider the pressing need to establish a shared basis on which to maintain and control the Caribbean’s natural environment, and to establish a new viable balance between tourism, agriculture, and extractive industries in the region’s land and sea spaces. 

And finally, there is the importance of leadership, and retaining a vibrant, facts-based media, that is better trained, less parochial and more outward looking, able to provide information and commentary in a region that remains a bastion of free speech in a world veering towards populism, authoritarianism, and control.

Too many years have passed when little has altered in the way the region addresses change. 

By now the Caribbean ought to have become a modern integrated unity that is strong, speaks with a single voice, pandemic apart is making economic progress, and is supported by an executive authority to which decision making has been ceded in well-defined areas. 

However, long after independence and the establishment of multiple overlapping institutions, it is still far from achieving any of this, to the extent that it may be worth asking whether the idea of the Caribbean as a single entity, is real or just an illusion?

At best it is the positive expression of a vibrant, cultural, self-possessed, and sovereign identity. But looked at objectively it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the expression is not much more than a dream, and for the most part a geographic description imposed by the outside world: a colonial construct used for administrative ease that has outlived its usefulness. 

As such, cultural identity apart, the notion of ‘the Caribbean’ may have become a trap, one that most outside the region and some within, fall into when it comes to problem solving. 

While the designation is convenient for those who need to package the region for policy or other purposes, a much better way of understanding ‘the Caribbean’, may be to find a different framework for analysis; one that recognises that the region is multidimensional, overlapping, awkward, a model with many moving parts and peoples, stretched, fragmented, and divided by more than a million square miles of ocean.

Asking whether ‘the Caribbean’ really exists may seem a surreal, even absurd question. However, the desire for unity that the term signifies may go some way towards explaining why the region now finds itself struggling to deliver the singularity the name promises, to realise its potential, and why it devotes so much time to trying to achieve, let alone deliver common positions.

Geographically, the region is normally considered to be all that lies between Suriname and French Guiana in the south, Belize in the west, Barbados and the islands of the OECS in the east, and Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas in the North. 

However, a more functional future solutions-based approach may be to accept there is a common cultural identity defined by a shared colonial history of exploitation and suffering, that crosses the language divide, but will increasingly separated  by national identity and ever-widening alternative futures.

Put another way, within the all-embracing concept of ‘the Caribbean’, there may be better institutional ways to create a more effective future, one which ignores history, geography, smalless and separation, but is based on connectivity and all that the fourth industrial revolution is now enabling. 

Reimagined, and probably asymmetrical and multi-speed, solutions that are wholly of the Caribbean’s own making will become of increasing importance as the chill in relations between the West and China seeks to draw the region into their web. 

David Jessop is a consultant to the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at 

david.jessop@stagingcaribbean.wpengage.uk

Previous columns can be found at https://www.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/

July 2nd, 2021

The next column, which is now monthly, will be published on 1 August 2021

David Jessop, Consultant and Non-Executive Director of the Caribbean Council, writes a weekly column providing a European perspective on Caribbean events, which is syndicated and widely read in the Caribbean press. An archive of the View from Europe columns be found below.