Barbados Prime Minister Defends CSME

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, Apr. 13, (CMC) – Barbados Prime Minister, Freundel Stuart, says the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Single Market and Economy (CSME) is not an end in itself, but “a means by which we all hope and intend to bring the people of the Caribbean closer together”.

The CSME allows for the free movement of goods, services, labour and skills across the 15-member CARICOM grouping.

Speaking with a group of 19 tertiary-level students of The University of the West Indies and a CARICOM Youth Ambassador, Stuart said, over the years, many individuals were constantly asking about the status of the CSME, and where it was going.

Prime Minister Stuart, who has lead responsibility for the CSME within the quasi CARICOM cabinet, said that the “primary, overriding objective of the CSME was the integration of the people of the Caribbean by whatever means regional governments and regional leaders were prepared to use.

“This regional integration movement is of very critical importance to the future of the Caribbean. It is not, and it has never been, a destination.

“It has always been a journey and there will always be aspects of the regional integration movement on which we can improve and, therefore, there can never come a time when we can throw our arms up in jubilation that we have, at last, become regionally integrated and that we have nothing else to do.”

He told the students that each CARICOM country should be regarded as “a strand in the regional tapestry”, and that the Caribbean picture “only becomes complete when the people of each and every Member State understand that they are part of a larger regional experience”.

Recalling the words of the late Barbados Prime Minister, Errol Barrow, who was also one of the signatories to the Treaty of Chaguaramas that established the regional integration grouping, Stuart said that there was no basis for the people of the region to be “imbued with a sense of our own inadequacy”.

“We are as good as anybody else and are capable of achieving what people in any part of the world are capable of achieving. But we have to believe in ourselves; we have to orient ourselves to what this region has as its resources – its people – [and] the quality of its human capital … and concentrate on developing the Caribbean,” he said.

Communications Specialist at the CSME Unit in Barbados, Salas Hamilton, thanked Prime Minister Stuart for his continued support of the program.

He said that since its inception in 2008, over 200 students from member states were able to travel to other destinations to see the CSME in action.

The students are now in Jamaica, as part of an ongoing exchange program on the CSME, organised by the CSME Unit.

While in Jamaica, they will interact with government officials, agencies, and businesses in the areas linked to the CSME initiative.

Funding for the program is being facilitated under the 10^th European Development Fund.