Prime Minister Mia Mottley today warned that the future of multilateralism is being threatened “at the very time it is needed more than ever” and urged Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries to put aside their differences and further develop the much heralded CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME).
The CSME allows for the free movement of goods, skills, labour and services across the 15-member bloc. Mottley, addressing the two-day CARICOM inter-sessional meeting that began in St Kitts today, said that last December’s special CARICOM meeting on the CSME in Trinidad and Tobago had achieved much in putting the initiative back on the front burner.
“The opportunity to have had two days of dedicated discussion has really made a fundamental difference in the trajectory that we can see now and the progress we can garner going forward. The difficulty, of course, is that all of us returned to our countries and became consumed with the items that informed national development. But if we have learnt but one thing in the last few months, it is that the future of multilateralism is threatened at the very time it is needed more than ever,” she said.
Mottley said small states such as those in the region “will only survive, not just economically, but in the world of diplomacy in the context of strengthening democracy” and that “more than ever we need to stay together, whether it is in fighting the European Union with respect to the blacklisting issue . . . whether it is in respect to our position on Venezuela, which ironically has become predominately the mainstream position of the world in that six weeks ago people were not calling for dialogue . . . .
“In fact, countries were rubbishing the notion of dialogue first; people were still remaining silent or, in fact, openly advocating military intervention. Now all but one have literally repudiated the military intervention with respect to humanitarian aid. There’s only one mechanism that the world knows that is impartial for the delivery of humanitarian aid and that mechanism has been in place for 69 years . . . and that is the UNHCR [United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees],” she added.
The Barbadian leader said CARICOM has been the vehicle that has allowed regional countries to take that principled decision.
“The bottom line, however, is that our economies are not necessarily capable of surviving on their own in this difficult and turbulent world. We believe that there may be fights . . . [and] the disruption to the multilateral trading environment and dispute resolution mechanism are just the symptoms of the underlining war that is taking place in today’s world,” Mottley contended.
“The next war is a technological and cyber security war and the dominance of who will be there is going to be determined by who controls the technology.”
Against the background of “other skirmishes and battles” that are being fought, she said “our only way out is to turn this region into an economic power of note within the Americas”.
“It cannot happen with individual countries trying to put one plus one plus one, one by one by one. But if we come together in the context of a strong single economy and a strong single market, all of a sudden it looks different,” Prime Minister Mottley argued.
“Where is the Caribbean and at what point do we determine that a land space needs a greater level of population to drive economic growth and smarter decisions and seamless decisions to be able to fuel that economic growth? That is what we are seeking to do within the context of the CSME,” she told the summit, adding that “that battle towards the dominance . . . requires a Usain Bolt approach and not a carnival-like approach to the movement of the CSME.”
Mottley said she was a “bit embarrassed” that having sat in Trinidad and taken decisions on the movement of agricultural workers and security guards, the tail appeared to be wagging the dog.
Specifically, she said it appeared that CARICOM’s Council for Human and Social Development (COHSOD) was wagging CARICOM leaders and had determined that it could not reach definitional arrangements and agreement as to who is an agricultural worker in the Caribbean.
“Now, if there is one category of worker that perhaps has dominated the passage of time in the Caribbean it has been agricultural workers, and if the second generation of independence leaders cannot come to proper conclusion as to who constitutes an agricultural worker and that is now going to hold up a conference from moving forward, such that the people of Suriname can see greater agricultural expansion and production . . . then we have to begin to ask ourselves what are we really doing with the governance,” Mottley argued.
“It has to do with the fundamental governance of this institution because we need to be dealing with the strategic issues here and not having to now remove the cobweb, not just on agricultural workers . . . .”
Mottley said she would find it difficult to face the media tomorrow at the end of the summit and tell the region “that the contingent rights, the protocol that we signed in July, still cannot be provisionally applied because we do not have enough member states who have signed, and that in spite of . . . the grand declaration in Montego Bay that we are not in a position to guarantee, in accordance with the treaty . . . a framework for dependents and spouses”.
She said Barbados had taken a position that it would go further than the existing measures “largely because we believe you cannot separate a dependent from a spouse”.
“So the notion that only a spouse is to get the benefits of the rights but dependents are not is a nonsense that carries us back to the separation of families in a time we would want to forget,” she added.
The Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) has been reliably informed that among the countries opting out of the protocol on contingency rights are Antigua and Barbuda and St Kitts and Nevis.
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