ALBA is 'wake-up call' for CARICOM - Girvan

Development economist, Professor Norman Girvan, has urged the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to sit up and pay attention as the Hugo Chávez-led Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA) continues to make rapid advances.

Over the last 72 hours, the eight-nation bloc approved a new economic integration system dubbed ECOALBA, and opened its doors to welcome another three CARICOM member states.

At ALBA's 11th summit in Venezuela ending on Sunday, Haiti was granted permanent observer status and Suriname and St Lucia were made "special guest members", as a prior step to their full entry.

The two countries also indicated they intended to join another Chávez integration initiative, PetrocCaribe, Venezuela's preferential credit oil scheme.

They are set to join Dominica, Antigua & Barbuda and St Vincent & the Grenadines, as well as five Latin American member nations - Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua.

Describing ALBA as a dyna-mic integration grouping, Professor Girvan told the Caribbean Media Corporation that ALBA's growth must be a wake-up call for CARICOM.

"(ALBA) poses the urgency of revitalising CARICOM, and if CARICOM continues to be relatively moribund in its economic integration aspect, then inevitably ALBA will become an attractive alternative for more and more CARICOM states," Girvan said.

Chávez announced that each member state agreed to contribute one per cent of its foreign exchange reserves to the proposed Bank of the ALBA. He said that in the case of Venezuela, this represented $300 million, an amount that will be used to create a common development fund that would pave the way for greater financial independence in the region.

Girvan said ALBA is proving to be a "more dynamic" grouping than CARICOM is at the moment.

"They are mobilising resources on a much more significant scale," he told CMC. "The ALBA bank and PetroCaribe funding are much larger than those mobilised by the CARICOM Development Fund, and as ALBA is moving ahead they keep launching into new projects, for example, food security and agriculture that CARICOM has been talking a lot (about) but doing very little."

- CMC