Editorial | Mr Symmonds is right

Barbados’ foreign minister, Kerrie Symmonds, has given his “superiors” – as he refers to Caribbean Community (CARICOM) heads of government – very sound advice.

He has urged them to gather “behind closed doors” to thrash out a raft of divisive geo-political disputes that have re-emerged in the community, posing existential threats to CARICOM.

This newspaper’s only addition to Mr Symmonds’ sentiment is that the get-together should happen as a matter of urgency. The Gleaner therefore reiterates its earlier suggestion to the leaders that they bring forward their so-called intercessional summit, which is usually held towards the end of February, to early in the new year.

Hopefully, the community’s outgoing chairman, Jamaica’s prime minister, Dr Andrew Holness, and his successor for the next six months, Terrance Drew of St Kitts and Nevis, have proposed this adjustment to the regional timetable and that their colleagues, including their Trinidad and Tobago counterpart, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, have agreed.

CARICOM is an economic and functional cooperation organisation of 15 Caribbean nations who have ambitions of transforming their emerging single market into a genuine, single, regional economy.

After years of stagnation and being slow in implementing fundamental decisions, the community, in 2025, appeared to be making headway in extricating itself from its tendency to dawdle. For instance, having changed its treaty allowing for multiple-speed implementation of initiatives, four CARICOM members – Belize, Barbados, Dominica and St Vincent and the Grenadines – agreed to the full free movement of citizens between their countries, inclusive of the right to live and work. Which is a critical component of a single market and economy.

PLUNGED INTO TURMOIL

However, the regional grouping has again been plunged into turmoil by two leaders who returned to power after voter-enforced hiatuses: the US president, Donald Trump and Ms Persad-Bissessar, the Trinidadian leader whose United National Congress (UNC) won her country’s general election in April.

CARICOM has long declared the Caribbean a zone of peace. It was not surprising when President Trump dispatched a naval armada to the southern Caribbean (ostensibly to fight drug traffickers, but really to engineer the collapse of Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela) that the community’s leader reasserted that ambition, as well as called for responding to drug smuggling in accordance with international law.

Ms Persad-Bissessar demurred on both counts. After the US military blew up the first vessel in the Caribbean Sea, killing four people, the Trinidad and Tobago PM urged the Americans to “kill them all violently”.

Later at the United Nations, she repudiated the idea of the Caribbean as a zone of peace, using as her context that narcotics smuggling fuelled crime in the region. She followed up by granting the United States permission to set up a radar system in Tobago to support its military operation in the Caribbean Sea.

This month, after President Trump imposed visa restrictions on Antigua and Barbuda, supposedly because of Washington’s dissatisfaction with how they operated their citizenship by investment programmes, Ms Persad-Bissessar made it clear that CARICOM didn’t speak for her government when it urged dialogue between the parties.

Further, she declared CARICOM to be an unreliable partner; claimed that some countries were supporting a “dictator” in Venezuela, even though President Maduro aggressively maintained Caracas’ claim to two-thirds of Guyana; suggested that fissures in the community could trigger, to its disintegration; and accused Antigua and Barbuda of “bad-mouthing” the United States, leading to Washington’s action against them. She, in that context, advised Trinidadians to “behave yourselves”.

HIT BACK

Antigua and Barbuda’s prime minister, Gaston Browne, hit back, pointing out that Trinidad and Tobago exported over $1 billion worth of goods to the community annually, but imported relatively little (US$149 million in 2023) from the region. Trinidad and Tobago’s manufacturing strength is supported by CARICOM’s common external tariff (CET), which makes imports from outside the community more expensive.

Voices in St John’s have floated the idea of a regional ban on Trinidadian goods.

That would be economically unhealthy for the Trinidad and Tobago economy, as for the survival of a group of small, weak countries, whose strength in a hostile global environment rests in their status as a regional collective.

Which is why Mr Symmonds’ proposal for the leaders to confront the issues in the privacy of a summit caucus, rather than ranting in public, makes sense.

He said: “I think, though, that it is always helpful for leaders to have dialogue. And, if I could risk saying something to my superiors, because all of the leaders are obviously my superiors, I would want to say that it is perhaps best to have the dialogue behind closed doors and that there’s a sharing of concerns on all sides.”

He made concessions to Ms Persad-Bissessar’s national security concerns, but also noted that CARICOM’s charter spoke of security in regional terms.

In working through this bad patch, CARICOM leaders, even those who may be reflexively disposed to Ms Persad-Bissessar’s point of view, should consider a another of Mr Symmonds’ observations: “... There are not many people in the world who are going to look to the North and say that that which they see is either paternal, collegial relationship or that that which they see is something that can be depended on, in the context of reliability.”