From the McClatchy Press:

Crews in Port of Spain, Trinidad are cleaning the streets, tidying hotels and corralling the homeless into shelters – out of sight of visiting dignitaries who will arrive this week in advance of the fifth Summit of the Americas, which starts on Friday.

It is the western hemisphere’s largest and most important gathering of democratically elected leaders in years, and Barack Obama’s introduction to the region in a climate of global economic crisis. He will share the stage with 33 of his counterparts.

That makes it a very big deal for the region, but an even bigger deal for the host country.
Trinidad is accustomed to moving large crowds at its annual carnival, the Caribbean’s largest, but it is new to the logical challenge of welcoming 34 world leaders and their entourages, all vying for equal attention.

There will be at least twice as many visitors as hotel rooms to hold them.

In preparation for the spotlight, even the downtown skyline has received a $500m face lift. Three new government-financed towers, including a 428-bed Hyatt Regency hotel and conference centre, now grace a transformed waterfront adorned with newly painted murals of Caribbean life, palm trees and a brick-layered walkway.

Obama will become the first American president to visit the English-speaking Caribbean since Bill Clinton sat down with leaders of the Caribbean community in Barbados in 1997.

This is the first hemispheric summit to be held in the Caribbean. Miami hosted the first Summit of the Americas in 1994.

“We’re very, very summit-focused,” foreign affairs minister Paula Gopee-Schoon said. “At this stage, we are formulating the meetings, scripting them.”

With the global financial crisis and the country’s lush hills as backdrops, the leaders are expected to tackle topics as diverse as the decades-old US economic embargo against Cuba and how to build a common defence against drug trafficking to protecting vulnerable habitats.

“It’s a chance for true engagement of the entire western hemisphere,” Gopee-Schoon said. “It’s the opportunity to face, as a group, the common challenges that are before us and the common solutions toward them – especially at a time when the world is faced with various crises in the areas of food security, energy security, economic and financial stability.”

But putting on an event of this magnitude in a country the size of Delaware – a country that consists of Trinidad and its sister island, Tobago – is a huge undertaking.

There are only three roads in and out of Port of Spain from Piarco international airport, limiting the options for transporting hemispheric leaders. The country has only 1,700 hotel beds, and it is expecting between 4,000 and 6,000 visitors.

The American delegation alone is about 1,000 strong, followed by Venezuela’s, about 200.

Washington. – U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will visit Dominican Republic Thursday where she’ll hold several meetings including one with president Leonel Fernandez.

The U.S. State Department said Mrs. Clinton will also meet with Haiti president René Preval, to deal with “topics of joint interest that include stability, security and aid.”

The former American First Lady will also meet with the representatives of the U.S. Agency for International for Development (AID) in the country.

Prior to her arrival the U.S. official will visit Haiti and according to reports her visit’s main reason is to strengthen relations between Dominican Republic and its neighbor country.

As part of the advance preparations of Mrs. Clinton’s visit a U.S.Embassy delegation visited the National Palace Monday morning, and met with officials of the Presidential Guard and of the Presidency’s Press Office.

It was learned Mrs. Clinton will remain in the country until Friday and from here fly to Trinidad & Tobago to participate in the Summit of the Americas, event president Leonel Fernandez is also scheduled to attend.

She announced a proposed 50 Million USD in aid to Haiti (a mere drop from the entire bucket the US has proposed in foreign aid this year), the hemisphere’s poorest nation. It is not yet been announced how that aid will be broken down. But barring any changes in USAID/Haiti‘s mission from 06-09 it’ll likely go towards the five objective areas previously outlined in the Bush Admin’s strategic plan for the country: Peace & Security, Economic Growth, Governing Justly and Democratically, Investing In People, and Humanitarian Assistance.

How the Clinton’s view what a healthy Haiti-Dominican partnership should look like is another thing that remains to be seen. One could reasonably guess however that main themes of mutual concern will be brought up: e.g. trafficking of persons/migrant cross-border and further integrating and better regulation of trade between the DR & Haiti and both countries with relation to the US. Haiti has long been on the losing end of the stick with trade. If the US is serious about their development they will stop insisting on harmful trade liberalization policies and focus on better macro-economic strategies to decentralize ownership of production in Haiti.

From a statement issued by the OAS, the 4 most concrete priority areas identified are: 1) the issue of drug trafficking and its impact on the good functioning of public institutions; 2) efforts towards constitutional reform, and strengthening of the judicial system; 3) the current electoral process, including the preparations for the partial senatorial elections, scheduled for April 19, 2009; and 4) the implementation of the National Strategy for Growth and Poverty Reduction.

When you have known wanted drug-traffickers running for public office and the suspicion that there could be much more already existing in various levels of the government, it is positive that the government and the OAS have put the issue of drugs at the top of the list of intergovernmental concerns for the OAS members.

From the socio-economic perspective: road infrastructure, energy, education, health, irrigation, aquaculture, agriculture and support for the private sector have become the government’s top priorities.

El secretario general de la Secretaría General Iberoamericana, Enrique Iglesias, cree que los países centroamericanos y caribeños están siendo los más afectados por la escalada de los precios energéticos y de los alimentos.

Iglesias, quien ha inaugurado esta mañana el VII Encuentro Santander-América Latina, que tiene lugar en la Universidad Internacional Menéndez Pelayo, en la capital cántabra, ha explicado que estas subidas están afectando de forma muy distinta a los países latinoamericanos. Los que son exportadores de materias primas o alimentos se están beneficiando del alza de los precios, mientras que otros ven aumentar los riesgos de sostenibilidad.

En opinión de Iglesias, los gobiernos de estos países tienen que aplicar una política “de incentivos muy selectivos”, ya que la concesión de ayudas generalizadas para la adquisición de alimentos y energía puede resultar insostenible desde el punto de vista presupuestario.

El secretario general iberoamericano se mostró optimista sobre el futuro de la región, que sigue con su fase expansiva a pesar del cambio de ciclo en el resto de las economías mundiales, principalmente en EEUU y Europa. Entre los desafíos a los que América Latina tiene que enfrentarse en el corto plazo está el control de la inflación, estrictamente relacionada con la subida de los precios energéticos y de la alimentación.

En el medio plazo, Iglesias ha hecho hincapié en la necesidad de incrementar la productividad, mejorar la formación de los recursos humanos, fomentar la innovación tecnológica y la calidad de las instituciones, así como encontrar el justo equilibrio entre la presencia del público y del privado. Sobre este último punto, Iglesias reconoció que, pese a los avances alcanzados por la región en su conjunto, sigue habiendo diferencias entre los distintos países.

Banca saneada
Iglesias ha recordado que la banca latinoamericana se ha quedado al margen de los problemas que ha acarreado la crisis subprime, originada en EEUU, al sistema financiero internacional. “Tenemos una banca mucho más sana de la que tuvimos nunca”, ha afirmado el secretario iberoamericano, sentado al lado de Francisco Luzón, responsable de América Latina del grupo Santander, patrocinador del curso. No obstante, Iglesias ha insistido en la necesidad de profundizar en la bancarización de la región, y ha afirmado que cualquier nueva regulación financiera que afecte al sistema bancario latinoamericano tiene que tener en cuenta esta exigencia.

EEUU y Europa
Finalmente, Iglesias ha pronosticado que EEUU, responsable de la crisis financiera que lleva un año azotando a los mercados internacionales, saldrá antes que Europa del bache económico. “La economía estadounidense es más flexible”, ha explicado el secretario general, y además el país se enfrenta a los problemas económicos de una forma más directa que Europa.

Source: http://www.expansion.com/edicion/exp/economia_y_politica/es/desarrollo/1144044.html

Franklin W Knight
Wednesday, July 09, 2008

The latest reports indicate that Caricom is fading fast. Regional institutions constructed by Caribbean politicians have a strikingly poor track record. Caricom was more thoughtfully constructed than most, so it should have had better prospects.

That it is probably going the way of the ill-fated confederation of the 10 British Caribbean units of the late 1950s is a pity. Its failure should not discourage further attempts at regional cooperation. Now more than ever the Caribbean needs strong and effective regional institutions. Cooperation sometimes trumps competition and in the contemporary hostile world of avaricious and selfish short-term calculations, the advantage clearly lies with those who plan carefully for the long haul.

Building successful, enduring regional cooperative Caribbean institutions depends upon a common understanding of what it means to be Caribbean. Unfortunately, that understanding, although often taken for granted, remains frustratingly elusive. By and large, too many leading politicians remain mired in an obfuscating parochialism that undermines efforts at serving the wider region. Such politicians continue to place the interests of their particular territory above all others, although development and progress need not be a zero-sum game.

Successful regional organisations require accepting certain basic premises. The Caribbean, just like each entity, is extremely complex and is likely to remain so. Constructing regional cooperative ventures ought not to be premised on the eventual political integration and cultural uniformity of the region. Because a region shares a common meteorological service, or uses common currency, or coordinates its transportation network does not mean that it should have a common parliament. Although the European model of cooperation does have attractive aspects, the Caribbean should not slavishly copy from the outside but should build models compatible with its reality.

There is no inherent incompatibility between the importance of local issues and the importance of regional ones. Conflicts will inevitably arise, but all differences can be negotiated without resort to force. Mechanisms for resolving conflicts must be built into every organisation from the start. Moreover, not all issues are of equal importance requiring the attention of a regional body. Local issues that do not impact deleteriously on regional goals should be left to local institutions.

One of the major failings of Caricom was its inability to create a practical blueprint that carefully prioritised certain regional necessities and carefully set out ways of achieving them. Instead, it wanted to resolve a broad range of problems all at once, despite the fact that not all participants shared a common sense of urgency about moving toward their specified goals. So maybe the time has come to terminate Caricom and replace it with a better regional structure designed to confront the problems of the 21st century, rather than rehash the tired and intellectually bankrupt positions of more than 50 years ago.

As always, it is necessary to agree on exactly what one means by the Caribbean. Any definition must reflect the rich variety of the Caribbean as well as undermine the notion that the regional entity is merely an expansion of any of its selected conventionally defined components.

That will not be easy since it flies in the face of some enduring traditions. For too long the Anglophone Caribbean has accepted the terms British West Indies and Caribbean as synonymous. And similarly, French, Spanish and Dutch Antilleans have considered their segments to be interchangeable with the wider region. This is akin to the way the United States of America often monopolistically appropriates the terms United States or America. Yet some federalist states such as Mexico officially incorporate the terms in their title, and the entire land mass between Alaska and Argentina comprises the Americas.

If building a new Caribbean consciousness is far from easy, it is worth remembering that nothing in the Caribbean experience has ever been easy. The history of the Caribbean has been one of perpetual revolutions. Revolutions, like volcanic eruptions, have unpredictable consequences. For more than 500 years the Caribbean has been undergoing a series of revolutions, and building a common Caribbean consciousness requires an understanding of that ongoing process of revolution. But where do we start?

We should start with the indigenous inhabitants. They were not a common group, although they did many things the same way and held many similar basic beliefs. Their lives and their world were irrevocably shattered by the arrival of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish adventurers after 1492. Spanish and Portuguese colonisation and expansion revolutionised the Americas. Those Iberians introduced new concepts of religious beliefs, new forms of political administration and new economic structures. They also repopulated the hemisphere with hybrid peoples in complex plural societies, a process continued by the other Europeans who joined them in the Americas at the beginning of the 17th century.

But that was not all. By introducing new varieties of plants and animals, the Spanish began to transform the ecology of the Americas. Europeans introduced to the Caribbean varieties of plants and animals with which they were familiar, or which attracted their interest for economic or aesthetic reasons. From Europe they brought citrus, sugar cane, cotton, wheat, horses, cattle, sheep, pigs, and dogs. From Africa they brought bananas, coffee, ackee, and yams. From Asia came rice, breadfruit, mangoes and the mongoose. In return Europeans took from the Americas tobacco, maize, manioc, cocoa, potato, tomato, pineapple, peanut, the turkey and the buffalo.

By the 18th century there existed a flourishing Atlantic trading system. That transatlantic trade involved gold, silver, salt, sugar, indigo, cotton, tobacco, cochineal, logwood, (and later bananas and coconuts). These trades went arm in arm with the trade in European servants and African slaves. The slave trade exacerbated the series of revolutions that dramatically altered the Caribbean and the Americas. From 1492 the Caribbean has shared a common history. If all people in the Caribbean know the contours of that common history, they can begin to construct efficacious institutions that serve them well. Knowledge of the past can most definitely be useful for the future.

UNITED CARIBBEAN: Integration not at all easy

Published on: 7/4/08

BY MICHELLE CAVE

THERE ARE CERTAINLY many challenges to integrating the Caribbean. But that is so with any process and certainly with one as productive as this will be. Cheryl Morales, a headmistress in Cuba, certainly knows this.

She has been at the forefront of a movement to have Cuba deepen its ties with the other islands of the Caribbean for nearly a decade. To her mind this will at once strengthen and promote self-awareness in the Afro-Cubans, simultaneously having the wider Caribbean alerted to Cuba’s great potential contribution of cultural, economic and social wealth.

Slowly through the last decade, she has been creating a generation of Cubans aligned with being part of the Caribbean, though having much in common with Latin America. Cheryl has painstakingly shown the examples of all the countries in the world linking, becoming a bigger, stronger unit for their greatest benefit.

She teaches them about the African Union with their 53 states – forming their union in daunting circumstances and the direst of odds.

She is going deep into the structures of the Asian examples of regional integration, how they have step by step brought the customs laws, then legislative aspects, the banking and monetary systems into unison.

She has them dissecting the American, South American and European models of integration, marvelling at the courage and even foresight of the European Union in wooing and bringing on Turkey with its mammoth market and population, bridging the previously unbridgeable – Christian and Muslim worlds.

Cheryl is clear that here in the Caribbean we have to figure it out, as it is silly to keep thinking of a population of 55 000 trying to find the resources to play on a continually levelling playing field in this globalised world.

Yes, she thinks it has to be accomplished regardless of the impediments. “And there are many,” she says, “even inside of us, saying we can’t do this, saying we have no experience of working, building together.

“So how,” she asks, “are we to unlearn fragmentation and competing, to learn cooperation and unification, after all of these centuries?”

She answers her own questions: “Well, we have been doing it, havent we? Bit by bit, we have been breaking down all of the walls we thought were made of hard rock, but indeed was just built from our imaginations.

“The math is stark: a single country in Africa, Europe or Asia – millions of people. A typical Caribbean country – 100 000. Regional is the way to go.”

“It’s pretty simple when you gain perspective, isnt it? The working it out, creating the structures to support and maintain it, is not beyond us. We certainly have the minds in this region to do anything we have the political will to accomplish; we always have.”

For example, everywhere I go, people are talking about how impressed they were with the system enabling freedom of movement through the region during the Cricket World Cup, and are anticipating its being rolled forward on a permanent basis.

But more. As Cheryl left, she said something, loosely translated: “I don’t know about you but my grandmother always told me, those people you don’t like, shower them with affection, you’ll learn to like them, and if you never learn, no one will be the wiser, not even you.”

Published on: 7/2/08.

BARBADOS, along with the Caribbean and Latin America, is seeking to get the Caribbean Sea recognised by the United Nations (UN) as a protected area for sustainable development.

Minister of State in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade and International Business Donville Inniss stressed the point both yesterday and Monday at the Association of Caribbean States’ (ACS) Seventh Meeting of the Caribbean Sea Commission.

The first day of the meeting was held at Sherbourne Conference Centre, Two-Mile Hill, and continued yesterday at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, St Michael.

Inniss said: “Most of our economy is heavily dependent on the Caribbean Sea, as a source of income, via fisheries, and as an integral product in our tourism plant.

“Alas, it has for centuries past, been the highways for travel of goods and services within this region,” he added.

The 25-member ACS conference was to draft a resolution to have the waterway protected from environmental pollution, any accidents at sea involving ships carrying nuclear waste and the consequences of other man-made disasters.

He said because the Caribbean sea was a major highway for goods and services, “we therefore are duly bound to protect and enhance the Caribbean maritime states.

“Such must be done within clearly identified parameters that are shaped by regional commitment for sustainable development of our maritime space,” he said.

He urged everyone to do their part locally while the regional governments do theirs both at the national and international level so that their efforts could culminate by yearend at the UN General Assembly.

ACS secretary general Luis Fernando Andrade Falla said: “Based on the discussions yesterday [on Monday] and today [yesterday] we are going to present a report with the advice and guidance of the scientists . . . with research evidence of what is happening in the waters of the Caribbean.

“The 25-member countries will eventually benefit . . . and get more resources from international community,” he added.

One of the panelists, Dr Leonard Nurse, added that there were several regional environmental projects in the meanwhile, “and those programmes will prepare the region to better respond to the climate change both in terms of finding mitigating measures and finding ways to adapt to these threats.

“So that the governments in the region are not sitting idly by but there are still lots to be done but the process has begun,” he said.

CaribWorldNews, NEW YORK, NY, Weds. July 2, 2008: Three Caribbean leaders addressing the opening of the 29th Conference Of Heads Of Government in Antigua & Barbuda yesterday used most of their remarks to urge each other to step up their efforts to deliver for the people of the region.
Facing tough economic times as a result of the global economic crisis that’s seen huge increases in food prices for many nationals region-wide, the leaders of Jamaica, Guyana and Antigua used their remarks to urge for more movement by leaders to address the needs of their nationals.

`We need to review the inventory of our accomplishments and our failures. … [And] where there have been failures, let us redouble our efforts to correct them so that we can move on,` said Prime Minister Bruce Golding of Jamaica.

He reiterated that claims are justifiably being made on CARICOM by the people of the Caribbean `especially at this time when they are being battered and bruised by forces that are neither of their making nor within our control.`

And Golding urged, `In this time of crisis, strong leadership is critical. … CARICOM provides the framework. The Caribbean people await our response.`
Guyana President Bharrat Jagdeo for his part, insisted that CARICOM ` cannot continuously define and redefine the goals of integration.`

`We have to balance the seeming obsession with architecture and framework and noble and lofty ideas, however important they are, with the need to work on practical initiatives – initiatives that create opportunities for our young people and entrepreneurs, initiatives that solve problems facing our people on a daily basis, initiatives that allow the Region to remain viable in the face of a changing world,` said the Guyanese leader.

Jagdeo also used his remarks to urge CARICOM leaders to urgently address the food crisis that is also affecting the Caribbean. `How will we secure this Region’s food supplies?  How are we going to ensure that we feed our children in the future?  Do we want to leave them to an uncertain future that may mean hunger?,` he questioned before adding,  `You cannot grow food by rhetoric or talk or even a food strategy (important as it is) but by investment.  This will happen when governments show solid commitment by increasing budgetary allocations and work consistently to remove constraints to create more incentives for private sector investment.`

Jagdeo, also citing the need for the region to invest in its human resources by educating them about technology, insisted that an investment of $300 million could place a computer in every household across our region including 500 internet access points in Haiti.

`Such an investment will create vast social bandwidth and would revolutionize communication, education and business in our region`, said Jagdeo.

Antigua & Barbuda`s PM, Baldwin Spencer, the new chair of CARICOM, shared some of his fellow leaders sentiment, ending with a call for the streamlining of operations and for the movement of CARICOM to the next level.

`Now more than ever CARICOM is required to act as one.  There is no doubt that the external world treats us as one,` he said at the Sandals Hotel on the north western part of the island. `No country, big or small, has the capacity to solve problems such as drug-trafficking, climate change or escalating food prices on its own. We must act as one in the interest of the people of this region.`

Caribbean leaders are set to deal with several key issues including food security, enhancing regional tourism in the context of current international trends and rising food prices in the Caribbean and the world at large.

Crime and issues relating to the CARICOM Single Market will also be discussed and the Economic Partnership Agreement is also down for discussion.

Grenada’s Prime Minister Dr. Keith Mitchell, who is campaigning for a July 8 general election in his country and outgoing CARICOM chairman, Hubert Ingraham are absent from the four-day summit.

Caribbean leaders convene to discuss tourism

By ANIKA KENTISH 07.01.08

ST. JOHN’S, Antigua – Caribbean leaders will seek common strategies to ease the impact of soaring fuel and food prices on their fragile tourism-dependent economies at an annual summit opening Tuesday in Antigua and Barbuda’s capital.

Political leaders of the Caribbean Community, or Caricom, will dedicate a full day to discussing ways of maintaining the region’s crucial tourism industry in the face of high fuel costs and a soft American economy.

Tourism is the economic cornerstone of the Caribbean, which drew more than 15 million visitors to tropical beach resorts and colonial capitals last year.

Caribbean leaders worry that soaring airline-ticket prices and fewer flights could choke the stream of the vacationers that many tiny islands depend upon.

“We are poised at a very interesting period with some of the challenges that face us,” said Harold Lovell, Antigua and Barbuda’s Tourism Minister.

During a video conference, Caricom Secretary General Edwin Carrington told reporters in Antigua that leaders at the four-day gathering will also seek ways to maintain food security.

The Caribbean is grappling with a world food crisis as prices of corn, wheat, rice, soybeans and other farm products skyrocket. High oil prices and growing biofuel production have contributed to the pinch.

Only Grenada won’t be represented at the summit, as Prime Minister Keith Mitchell prepares for the southern Caribbean island’s parliamentary elections on July 8.

The 2008 summit marks the 35th anniversary of the 1973 signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas, which established the Caribbean Community.

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