Former Prime Minister Edward Seaga is pessimistic about an economic union among Caricom countries. - file

Former Prime Minister and Distinguished Fellow of the University of the West Indies Edward Seaga says Caricom should shift focus towards fostering greater cooperation among member countries rather than making futile attempts at integrating the region.

"Thirty-five years have passed since CARICOM was established by the Treaty of Chaguaramas and it has still not gained sufficient traction," said Seaga.

He suggested that the regional leaders who had originally conceptualised the arrangement as a tool of economic development and integration had been replaced by younger minds with different objectives. "This is an excellent time, therefore, for Caricom to be revisited by new minds to find new approaches."

Seaga, independent Jamaica's fifth premier, also said the creation of the single economy component of the Caricom Single Market may never come into effect because the adaptation of a Caribbean Monetary Union for establishing a single regional currency will not work.

Top-heavy bureaucracy

"Basically, integration as a strategy, in the case of Caricom, is an attempt to force an oversized foot into an undersized shoe," he said, adding that the bloc was "top-heavy in bureaucracy and bottom-light in benefits."

His suggestion for greater cooperation among the 15-member countries would gain more traction, Seaga suggested, because there is already a strong element of goodwill that underpins trade and regional discussions.

"This goodwill has all along created pockets of intra-regional cooperation because most people of the Caribbean see themselves as occupying the same lifeboat," he stressed in his presentation at the annual Jamaica Stock Exchange Investment and Capital Markets Conference at the end of January.

The opportunities for cooperation, he added, lie in marketing the region as a health tourism destination, development of music and fashion design, sports, agriculture and biotechnology.

And the time differential between the Caribbean and Europe, he advised the conference, made Caricom an excellent location for the outsourcing of work for European companies.

"Europe is asleep while the Caribbean is awake," said the former PM.

"The value lies in the ability to do outsourced work of a wide variety, in the Internet processing of engineering and architectural plans, radiological readings of X-rays, CAT-Scan and MRI films, and transcription of notes laboriously written by doctors and lawyers," he said.

john.myers@gleanerjm.com