Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretary General, Dr. Carla Barnett, says while the current arrangements allow for Caribbean people to “pick up and move from one CARICOM state to another” there are still problems associated with the free movement of people under the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME).
In 1989, CARICOM leaders agreed in the need to establish the CSME as a means of deepening the regional integration movement to better respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by globalization.
Regional leaders had expected that the initiative, which allows for the free movement of goods, skills, labor, and services, would have been fully implemented in 2008.
But as she engaged in a question-and-answer session following her delivery of the Owen S. Arthur Distinguished Lecture Series on Monday night, Barnett said while the initiative allows for a Caribbean national to be granted an automatic six-month stay in another regional country “that does not give you the authority to work.
“That gives you the authority to spend a holiday…, visit your family that kind of thing,” she said, noting that there is also an agreement on the movement of various categories of workers “and this is where I sometimes describe what we have done as not free movement although what we say is the objective is”.
She told the audience it is a “really regulated movement” and that more and more that is being understood as a system that is not “necessarily efficient and I would like to think that there are likely to be conversations on removing some of those real barriers.”
She said the movement of skilled nationals requires an infrastructure being put in place in each member state “and so there is a lot of work to be done…’
“To have people move freely would be for me, an opening to wider community building because people moving from place to place and getting to know one another is one part of the community building process that we need to have in place.”
But she said another impediment is the issue of transportation, recalling that in the old days when “we were all colonies of her Majesty’s empire we could just get on a boat and move from one place to another, there was no issue at all.
“But one of the realities of being invested as sovereign states is that we put in place regulations to manage the flow of persons from one place to another and that’s the reality we live with.
“So we have to work through that to make it as smooth as possible,” she added.
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