St. Jude’s Hospital under Water

Unconfirmed reports reaching the Powerhouse indicate that a ruptured pipe at the George Odlum facility which now houses St. Judes Hospital has brought about a massive flood at the building, resulting in a partial evacuation of patients from the facility to Victoria Hospital..

Reports suggest the many volunteers who came to rescue could not avert the disaster.

The Health Minister who arrived on the scene long after the damage had been done was trying to mobilize help and support – technical and otherwise – to bring the situation under control; it is reported that his initial efforts were almost in vain.

Let’s us hope the matter will be successfully resolved during the course of the evening and that the patients will be spared the worst.

An update will be provided as soon as it becomes available.

FIRE THE TOURISM MINISTER, NOW!

Apparently, the Minister for Tourism and Civil Aviation despite his pedigreed background has proven time and again to be a major source of embarrassment to St. Lucia.

Many of us who thought Senator Chastanet would be an asset to St. Lucia are now "seeing the light". His deep deficiencies and blatant dishonesty which came to the fore with Tuxedo-gate Affair when the High Court fell just short of proclaiming him as ministerial “persona non grata” are, to say the least, troubling. The court ruled that he had absolutely no credibility. In other words, the court proclaimed him to be an outright liar.

We thought Senator Mr Chastenet would have learned a moral lesson from that damning proclamation; but apparently he did not; like a “fairy tale” mill, he has continued to churn untruths and inefficiencies with unmatched regularity.

The latest episode is the CARICOM Airways debacle which is uncommonly shrouded in an ocean of mystery. Senator Chastenet has made a mess with the CARICOM Airways issue. Previously, he had the PM of SVG (Dr Gonsalves) and Dr Anthony lecturing him on Sub-regional Civil Aviation theory and praxis. This was followed by the inevitable – the ECCAA grounded the Dutch-based company for non-compliance with the law and safety practices. The question now being asked is: Why should a Minister for Tourism and Civil Aviation be fronting to that extent for a foreign airline company operating illegally in St. lucia?

We understand that this is very much in keeping Chastanet’s innate credibility problem; but can St. Lucia continue to have its image tarnished and battered to that extent by a minister of Government?

A few years ago, St. Lucia was the epicentre of excellence in the Caribbean. With the accomplishments of two Nobel Laureate and with young bright intellectuals like Kenny Anthony, Dwight Venner, Earl Huntley and Dr Joseph Parris making their mark, St. Lucia was considered a formidable force to be reckoned with. Today, we have become a warped relic of what we were! That tradition of excellence is now being replaced with the traditions of the Sam Floods, Rick Waynes, Rufus Bousquets, Stepenson Kings and Allan Chastanets. St. Lucia must now be the laughing stock of the Caribbean and the world.

To avoid further embarrassment to St. Lucia, the Powerhouse requests one New Year Gift from our Honorable Prime Minister: Sir, kindly remove Allan Chastanet from your Cabinet of ministers.

Trade between China and region to be expanded

CHENGDU, China, Thursday October 28, 2010 - The Export-Import Bank of China (Eximbank) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) have signed a Letter of Intent to boost trade between China and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC).

The partnership will finance up to US$200 million worth of trade activity during any given period for an initial two-year period.

The latest step to expand trade relations between the two regions was taken at the recent China-LAC Business Summit, held in Chengdu, China.

“This partnership furthers the important link between China and Latin America and the Caribbean by increasing the amount of available financing for trade activity between the two regions,” said IDB President Luis Alberto Moreno.

“Since trade is a fundamental economic driver of both LAC and China’s economies, we believe the partnership between China Eximbank and IDB to be a groundbreaking initiative to support increased trade activity.”

The Letter of Intent details the partnership and the structure of the agreement in which both the IDB and China Eximbank will co-finance trade loans under the IDB’s Trade Finance Facilitation Programme (TFFP).

China Eximbank’s co-financing under the agreement will be exclusively for trade between LAC and China.

Revitalize the ACP for a Chinese deal

By Sir Ronald Sanders

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados,, December 9, 2010 - On December 2, the government of the People’s Republic of China posted on its Foreign Ministry’s website a response to a commentary I had written entitled, “Chinese take-away?”. 

The fact that the government felt it necessary to post its response on its official website is indicative of the sensitivity to the issues that were raised in the commentary.  Among the issues was the need for a treaty to be negotiated that would set out the relationship between Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) countries and China on a long term and predictable basis with regard to aid, trade and investment.  It was envisaged that the treaty would deal with issues such as the paramountcy of local laws in relation to the use of labour and industrial relations among other things.

In its response, the Chinese government said that it agreed with me “in the necessity of China and the CARICOM countries deepening their ties of friendship and cooperation via a long-term and comprehensive framework treaty or the like”.

Therefore, there is clearly an appetite in the government of China for a binding treaty, and one which Caribbean governments would do well to advance while the interest remains. 

In an earlier commentary than the one to which the Chinese government specifically responded, I had floated the notion that such a treaty could be structured along the lines of the original aid, trade and investment agreements (Lome and Cotonou) that were negotiated with the European Union (EU) jointly by the 79 African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group.

Given that China is now very active in all three ACP regions and that many countries in each of them are being exercised over how best to manage the China relationship, it may indeed be appropriate for the ACP to negotiate the overall treaty that would govern the relationship with China.  Separate protocols to the overarching treaty could cater for the specific circumstances of smaller nations.

The urgency of attending to China’s relationship with developing countries and particularly small island states is highlighted in a recent report by the Inter-American Development Bank entitled: “Ten years after take-off: Taking stock of the China-Latin America and the Caribbean Economic Relations”.  More about the economic relations between Latin America and China than the economic relations between China and the Caribbean, the report shows that trade between China and Latin America in the period 2000-2008, “grew at a breakneck annual rate of 31 percent, and even during the financial crisis in 2009 the dynamism remained unabated”.  

As the report states: “Hidden behind the impressive bilateral trade figures of the last decade, there is a heavily skewed distribution of benefits. As of 2008, approximately 90 percent of LAC’s exports to China were coming from just four countries in the Southern Cone: Brazil (41 percent), Chile (23.1 percent), Argentina (15.9 percent) and Peru (9.3 percent)”.  Caribbean countries hardly featured as exporters, and their balance of trade remains heavily in China’s favour. 

The report also points out that “China-LAC relationship in the last decade has stood almost entirely on one pillar: trade. The other pillars of a sustainable process of trade and integration—bilateral investment and cooperation—have been developing, but not at the same pace, leaving room for frictions”. 

Chinese Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is also heavily concentrated in the Southern Cone, with Brazil (41 percent), Argentina (11 percent), Peru (12 percent) and Chile (2 percent) accounting for 66 percent of the investment in 2003–2009. When Venezuela is added to this group, the combined share reaches 81 percent.   The only two CARICOM countries, mentioned in the report, Guyana and Suriname received US$600,000 and US$24 million respectively over the years 2003-2009 in Chinese FDI.

All this suggests that CARICOM countries are not aggressively pursuing economic relations with China in a structured fashion.  Each country that has diplomatic relations with China appears to be pursuing ad-hoc, beggar-thy-neighbour policies.  But with far fewer resources of interest to China, CARICOM countries (except Guyana, Suriname and Jamaica which do have resources in which China has an interest),  CARICOM nations ought to be trying to establish investment and cooperation agreements with China that go beyond trade in goods. 

Such a negotiation would not be easy for the CARICOM region alone, as it would not be for the Pacific and certain countries in Africa, although it has to be acknowledged that several African countries have overhauled their trading regimes to make themselves far more competitive than they used to be.

In this connection, the ACP Group with an existing Secretariat and experience of harmonising the needs and negotiating strategies of its member states would be the ideal vehicle to negotiate an overall trade, aid and investment treaty with China. 

The basis for doing so is already enshrined in the Georgetown Agreement signed on 6 June 1975 in Guyana that formally established the ACP Group.

ronald_sanders_300_759685897.jpgIn the preamble to the Agreement, the governments of the Group declared that they are “desirous of enhancing the political identity of the ACP Group to enable them to act and speak with a single voice in all international fora and organisations”, and they set out among their objectives strengthening “the political identity of the ACP Group to enable it to act as a coherent political force in international bodies and to ensure that due regard is accorded its specific interests” and to “establish contacts and relations with other States and groups of States”.

In a world of fierce competition in economic relations, and where, increasingly, small states have to seek alliances with others to secure the attention they urgently need, the time has come not only to strengthen cohesion in the ACP Group in its dealing with the EU, but also to invoke its wider mandate to bargain for its member states as a whole in other economic relations.  China would be the right place to start now.

In the past, Caribbean countries have been key players in the formulation of ACP ideas and strategies that have benefitted all three regions.  This could be another such opportunity.

Which CARICOM government will hoist the banner?  Jamaica as the current Chairman of CARICOM or Trinidad and Tobago as the current Chairman of the Commonwealth that embraces many of the ACP

It may be, of course, that this is a deliberate strategy – a strategy not to fulfil obligations until the obligations of the treaties are enforced by the other side through costly arbitration and, eventually, punitive measures.   If that is indeed the strategy, it is a game of high-stakes poker, and not one that the region can win.

The point is that CARICOM states have to decide whether they see their development in terms of gifts for the odd building, a new Airport terminal, a bridge here and a road there that are small plasters for sores, but do not make the region holistically healthy. While there is a place for these things in development plans, they cannot be the entire plan.

What CARICOM has always needed – and what is urgent now – is a comprehensive regional plan devised jointly by governments, the private sector, trade unions and the best Caribbean brains that can be assembled from in and out of the region.  And, that plan must integrate production in a practical manner utilising resources from every country that has them, facilitate cross border investment, and encourage regional amalgamations of productive enterprises. 

The beggar thy neighbour policies that have characterised the region’s dealings for a decade and a year, should not continue into 2011.  It is time for leaders of individual states to make up their minds, state the case for regionalism boldly, and stop playing with the aspirations of the Caribbean people.

2011: Time to make up your mind

By Sir Ronald Sanders

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Friday December 31, 2010 - At the end of the first decade of the 21st Century, I wrote with a profound sense of disappointment that it was a “lost decade” for the Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM).  We had failed miserably to complete the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) and we had equally failed to build collectively the capacity that all CARICOM countries desperately require not only to bargain effectively in the international community but also to implement the things for which they have bargained.  The first year of the new decade was even worse, and 2011 portends greater grief unless CARICOM governments make up their minds about real and effective integration.

The time for tinkering at the edges of integration has run out.  CARICOM states must now either resolve to proceed with integration, and by so doing maintain some autonomy over their affairs, and crucially a Caribbean culture and identity, or they can flirt with such short term opportunities that they might derive individually from external governments that find it convenient in their own interest to dally with a few states separately.  The latter is not a sustainable development option, and is wholly reliant on the designs of the donor, not the bargaining strength of individual CARICOM states.

Failure to strengthen CARICOM has not only weakened our already weak states, it has lost us respect in the international community.  And, this is true of every aid agency and every international and multilateral financial and trade institution including the Canadian International Development Agency,  the European Commission and the European Development Fund, the United States Agency for International Development, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Trade Organisation (WTO).

What they see from their perspective is a region that fails to carry out its own agenda – a region that pays lip service to regionalism.  The things that are obvious to them are blatant: failure to complete the CSME; discrimination by CARICOM states against themselves as they try to block market access to each other for goods and services while they are happy to give better access to others; a marked reluctance to apply for readily available money for regional projects – governments are interested in national projects only; and the comedy that has been made of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) with Trinidad and Tobago declining to participate in a Court whose headquarters is located in its Capital as a direct consequence of its insistence that it should be there; and, more recently, the heavy hint from Jamaica’s Prime Minister, Bruce Golding, that Jamaica might opt for its own final Court of Appeal, notwithstanding that it has an eminent jurist on the Court, and the opportunity for others.

The recent Golding heavy hint is strangely out of synchronisation with the Jamaican government’s measurable attitude to the institutions of the Caribbean Community where Jamaicans now prevail and will be even more dominant by April 2011.

Jamaicans now head four principal regional institutions:   the Caribbean Development Fund, the Caribbean Export Development Agency, the Caribbean Centre on Money and Finance, and the Office of the Trade Negotiations (OTN) of CARICOM.  By April, a Jamaican will also head the Caribbean Development Bank putting five Jamaicans at the headship of these regional organisations, and another Jamaican will most likely move up from the number 3 position in the OTN to number 2.  In addition, of course, Jamaica has a jurist on the CCJ itself. No other CARICOM country can boast of heading so many regional bodies.

These Jamaicans are all highly capable people working in the service of not only Jamaica but all of CARICOM, and accepted by all of CARICOM to look after CARICOM’s interest.

What then is the problem with the CCJ?  If CARICOM can show such confidence in Jamaicans, what is missing here? 

The CCJ shambles has added to the level of frustration and - now increasingly - disrespect for CARICOM in the international community.  But, not amongst them alone; the frustration is now manifest among the region’s academics, business people, media, and all those who spent the better part of their lives trying to maintain a Caribbean identity and culture, and, at least, a modicum of Caribbean autonomy over the  region’s affairs.

It is obvious to all who are, or have been, involved in our region’s development that none – not one – of our countries will successfully maintain Caribbean autonomy, culture and identity if the present trend of individual and opportunistic bargaining with larger and more powerful countries continues.

None of the CARICOM states have the capacity, individually, to cope with the demands of today’s globalised world. For instance, in the case of the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union (EU), few governments have established machinery for implementing their obligations, and it would be a great surprise if any have set up arrangements for monitoring implementation by the EU.  What would seem to be a simple thing - like sending notifications that requirements have been met - has not been done.  And, not only in relation to the EPA, but also in regard to the WTO.