St Lucia opposition leader tells OECS members to consider breaking away from CARICOM

KINGSTOWN, St Vincent, CMC – St Lucia’s Opposition Leader, Allen Chastanet, on Tuesday said the relationship between the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and the larger regional integration grouping, CARICOM, was not working and suggested that OECS leaders imagine what would happen if they break away from CARICOM and negotiate bilateral agreements with the other member countries.

The OECS groups Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, St Kitts-Nevis, Montserrat, Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands. It includes an economic and currency union, and there is free movement of OECS nationals within the union.

CARICOM includes the OECS as well as Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago.

Addressing the Seventh Meeting of the OECS Assembly in St Vincent, Chastanet said the OECS Assembly has become too ceremonial, adding that the challenges to citizenship by investment programmes (CBI) is an opportunity for the sub-regional grouping to prove itself.

He noted that the OECS Assembly was discussing bills about trade integration, “yet we are members of CARICOM in which that is not working, and all the leaders sitting around this table all know that our relationship with CARICOM is not working.

“So imagine if we had the tenacity to pull out of CARICOM and renegotiate bilateral agreements with Jamaica, bilaterals with Trinidad, bilaterals with Guyana and bilaterals with Barbados.

“Would we be better off?” said Chastanet, who served as prime minister of St Lucia between 2016-2021, adding that he was not saying that the OECS should do so.

“But, sometimes we have to ask ourselves that question. Because, certainly when I was prime minister, I felt that we were being ignored. I felt we were being disrespected. I felt so many times we went to a meeting at CARICOM and listened to the larger countries debate among themselves as if we were not even there, and reached no conclusion.”

He said that members of the OECS Assembly travelled to St Vincent “with the great expectation by coming together that we resolve something … to the benefit of to the people”.

Chastanet said that while this is often repeated, “it’s not sufficient to say it anymore. … We must act on it.

“I look at the bill, I ask myself, ‘Is it reasonable?’ Are we all going to sit here and try to suggest that we are going to have a common policy on the value of tariffs?

“Really? We all are different stages of development. And worse yet, when we hear, in my mind, we were talking about common internal tariffs, common VAT rate? Are we ready for that?”

He said that while the Revised Treaty of Basseterre, which established the OECS Economic Union, speaks about deeper integration, “it also maintains our own independence, and that recognises that we are different stages of development."

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