Caricom must step up

CARICOM’S agreement on Wednesday to form a united front could not come at a more pivotal moment in its history. Not only are the health and border protocols agreed to essential in battling covid19, but they must become the precursor of dramatically intensified economic and political collaboration going forward, given the effects of the pandemic.

Those effects could be profound and long-lasting. The economic landscape, as predicted by the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday, will be bleak, on course as it is to surpass the damage caused by the 2008 crisis and bringing to mind the Great Depression.

It’s not just a matter of the devastating loss of tourism revenue already sustained, it is also the expected slowdown in global trade as a whole which will affect islands that do not traditionally rely on tourist dollars. Revenues from energy, offshore banking, financial services – all could dry up.

This is distressing enough alone. But when we consider the region’s vulnerability to natural disasters – the 2020 Atlantic hurricane season is expected by meteorologists to be more active than usual – the picture becomes precarious. The very stability of the region is threatened.

In the face of these myriad existential threats, Caricom leaders must seize this moment to dispense with, once and for all, the murmurs and grumbles that have dominated regional discourse with regard to Caricom’s future. The infamous meeting between Andrew Holness and Mike Pompeo must be a relic of the past.

Caricom’s new health protocols assume even greater significance in the context of Donald Trump’s withdrawal of funding from the World Health Organization (WHO). That move, condemned as a “crime against humanity” by the Lancet medical journal’s editor-in-chief Richard Horton, represents Trump’s single most dangerous action to date, given its timing amid an ongoing pandemic, as well as its propensity to adversely affect the well-being of billions, both inside and outside of America’s borders.

It is the prerogative of any nation to withdraw funding, but Trump would appear to have cut off his nose to spite his face: withdrawal reduces the US’s ability to exert influence in WHO. And the world is made more dangerous given the prospect of North America’s most populous country going rogue in the global effort to fight pandemics.

Trump’s convenient scapegoating of WHO also has indirect implications for other collaborative international bodies often in his crosshairs like the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank – all key organisations for us.

Caricom’s unity is also imperative given vulnerabilities in the region such as Guyana, where serious questions now loom over the election fiasco there, and Barbados, where Prime Minister Mia Mottley recently underwent an undisclosed medical procedure that has briefly affected her mandate in office.

In other words, Caricom must step up.