(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) Former Prime Minister of Jamaica, the Most Honourable Percival James Patterson, on Thursday, charged Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to stand up and be counted for the Community.
In accepting CARICOM’s highest honour – the Order of the Caribbean Community (OCC) – Mr. Patterson told Heads of Government at the Opening Ceremony of their 30th Meeting in Georgetown, Guyana, that CARICOM was like “a growing plant which must be nurtured … Unless we tend to the tree, it will wither…”
Describing himself as an incurable and “unrepentant regionalist,” Mr. Patterson called for unity among the Heads encouraging them to learn to “sing from the same hymn sheet,” since “there’s simply no other way out especially in these times…”
The rest of the Region, he said, was waiting with bated breath to hear whether their leaders intended to keep the CARICOM boat afloat and if so, how they intended to do so.
The OCC Awardee noted that the challenges now being faced by the Community were different and far more daunting than those of 20 years ago, but he was convinced that the Community had enjoyed several successes in the areas of Functional Cooperation, the dismantling of trade barriers, entrepreneurialship, agriculture, ICT, Education, culture and sport development … and that it still had the resilience to look beyond the global crises and harness the positives for the greater good of Caribbean peoples.
Notwithstanding the successes, Mr. Patterson said, the continuity of the Community was neither automatic nor guaranteed. However, the former Jamaica Prime Minister told his former colleagues that the Community’s collapse was not an acceptable option because Caribbean peoples were depending on them to use regional integration as a vehicle to improve their lives.
What was needed, he said, was a resolve to act: “The litmus test is not in the meeting but in the actions which follow.” The Community’s greatest failure, according to Mr. Patterson, lay in its inability to follow-up decisions and to act.
“Who will stand up for CARICOM?” he asked.
In addition, he underscored the need to exploit new and dynamic relations with countries such as Brazil and Russia, without disturbing the relations with traditional trading partners.
Charging them to make the Single Economy a reality, Mr. Patterson cautioned against giving rights and access to external groupings while struggling with the issue of contingent rights for its own people.
He expressed further, his hope that he would see the day when the Caribbean make full use of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as the court of final jurisdiction.
In the citation read by Guyana’s Communication and Public Education Specialist Dr. Rovin Deodat, the Most Hon. P. J. Patterson was cited as the quintessential Caribbean man who was instrumental in building an integrated Caribbean from CARIFTA to CARICOM.
He was also lauded for his “priceless legacy of wisdom,” and acclaimed a champion of the development agenda and a doyen of regional development and cooperation who was instrumental in the completion of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas that formed the basis of the development of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy.
