PM says global crisis is the focus of CARICOM

We reported on Monday that Belize has handed over the rotating six month chairmanship of CARICOM to Guyana. At the four-day summit over the past weekend attended by the PM, there were several pressing regional issues tackled by the Heads of Government. At the Philip Goldson International Airport on Monday, the PM said that steering the Caribbean community out of the global financial crisis is one of the priorities for the region.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“The global financial and economic crisis is affecting the entire region. On that my position is well known. I staked it out at the UN conference on the matter. CARICOM has agreed that a number of prime ministers, a core team, will begin now to do the lobby work in the various international capitals to try and mobilize additional resources and to try to ensure that the IMF and the World Bank treat with our countries in a far more flexible fashion. I declined joining the mission because I know that there are very, very serious issues that require my immediate and focused attention in the immediate future here at home. But I left open the possibility of coming on as things begin to develop.”

“The issues were dominated or the conference was dominated by issues having to do with the single market. We’re a little bit out of the loop but the free movement of people has been causing some problems in the eastern Caribbean. There have been accusations leveled that Barbados, that it is not living up to its free movement commitment and that visitors or immigrants from Guyana and from the eastern Caribbean, especially St. Vincent and the Grenadines have been shabbily treated by the Barbados Immigration Authorities. The Barbadian Prime Minister I think was able to address that fairly satisfactorily and so it appears that that aspect of the integration movement is back on.”