Addressing the Importance of regional cooperation in advancing investment and Economic development at Concordia Summit 2022, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves says there are two critical strategic imperatives for economic development, sustainable development, security and addressing existential issues such as climate change and the financial system.
“We have to deepen regional cooperation. So there’s regionalism very criticality in a strategic sense and multilateralism to be engaged in the global political economy and to have entry points where you can seek particular advantages to do things within your own practical interests. Consistent, of course, with universal principles of engagement as laid down in the United Nations Charter and the multilateral system”.
Gonsalves said the regional integration has to be of an organic kind in which the strengths and weaknesses of each individual unit are dissolved into the whole so that the whole becomes more than a summation of the individual parts.
“Without, for instance, the Caribbean Public Health Agency, which is an allied institution of Caricom we would not have been able to fight the COVID pandemic. In the case of St Vincent and the Grenadines, without the seismic Research Center, which is based at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, to which we all contribute, we would not have been able to address the matter of the volcanic eruptions or in the case of the climate issues generally under weather systems, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency.
Gonsalves stated that within the whole framework of Caricom it is to be noted that CARICOM rest on four fundamental pillars.
“One economic integration includes a common market with a common external tariff inquest to a single market and a single economy and we are at various stages towards that except the Bahamas which is outside of the Caribbean single market and economy. Then there is a matter of functional cooperation, particularly in matters like health, education and the like. Thirdly the coordination of foreign policy and fourthly the matter of citizen security and national security generally”.
Gonsalves says all of the aforementioned are intertwined with our development, our economic development, economic growth and broadly sustainable development.
“During the period of COVID where the economies really crashed, ranging between minus The negative growth between close to 20%, two, 2.7% in the case of my own country, St Vincent and the Grenadines, that’s partly because we didn’t lock down and our tourism is not quite what it is in the Bahamas and Barbados, the only country which grew was um Guyana because it had started to produce and export oil”.
Gonsalves stated that for the region to come out of that hole in the subsequent period is an extremely challenging one and without the regional integration system and the multilateral system, the region will not be able to address efficaciously any of the challenges that it faces.
“Even when we address them, the journey is complicated by other factors. Sometimes it looks as though you are on and you’re going up a down escalator and you’re going up and this down escalator coming. The vagaries of the world economy and all its contradictions and then the war in Ukraine and all the price rises, it is just a phenomenal bundle of challenges”.
Gonsalves says while you may have a strategic frame for building back better and stronger, you need to ‘respair‘.
“It’s an old word, it means fresh hope. It goes beyond. It goes beyond the matter of just building better or stronger. It’s something very existential because, after periods of immense dislocation, convulsions and even despair, you have to have a new frame of reference. But that frame of reference cannot only be national within your own particular boundaries, but it has to be regional one and you have to look outwards”, Gonsalves said.
