CSME points bring focus on Trinidad and Tobago commitment

ON Monday, Trinidad and Tobago hosted representatives from Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, Montserrat and Suriname for fresh talks on the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME).

The group of representatives, referred to as CSME focal points, are the most recent effort to drive the project forward.

Monday's engagement was the fourth meeting of CSME focal points over the last three months, with familiarisation meetings in Barbados and Belize in October and Guyana in November.

At each of these short tours, these leadership-level representatives of Caribbean nations' CSME programmes had an opportunity to see how other member states are carrying out their commitments to the single market concept.

Some aspects of the tour are cultural and social, but the purpose is to understand how the CSME works and doesn't work.

That's important because, despite efforts dating back 58 years to the short-lived Caribbean Free Trade Agreement, the idea of skilled labour working across the region remains limited in scope and challenging in execution.

The CSME proper is 34 years old and began with the Grand Anse Declaration, signed in Grenada in 1989.

By July 2006, after the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas was signed in Nassau in 2001, there were 12 member states, but by 2015, the initiative had almost entirely stalled.

At a special summit on the future of the CSME in TT in December 2018, a three-year plan for implementing its core agreements, which sought broader harmonisation of the ability to work among the member states, but also strategically important initiatives such as regionally integrated company registration and synchronisation of company law, was drafted.

Despite having hosted the summit and agreed to its provisions, TT only adjusted its laws to fully support the movement of skilled workers within the CSME in March 2022.

Noting the glacial pace of this country's participation in the CSME project, Foreign Affairs Minister Amery Browne, during the debate on the Immigration (Caribbean Community Skilled Nationals) (Amendment) Bill, said, "If you count three years from 2018, it doesn't take you into the future, it takes you into the past."

It was a frank assessment of the "one cautious step forward, three determined steps backward" approach that has haunted all aspects of Caribbean integration, but has hallmarked the nuanced resistance to the CSME.

Former Guyanese government minister Robert Persaud accused TT nationals in October 2019 of using the CSME to launch "predatory" efforts to work in the country's oil and gas sector.

Speaking at the media event for the programme on Monday, TT Energy Chamber CEO Dr Thackwray Driver said the removal of restrictions on movement for labour would give companies the skills and expertise needed to grow and flourish.

That's long been a core concept of the CSME, but it will demand that the regional focal points, supported by a regional commitment, commit to true economic integration to turn those ideals into an effective reality.