“Regional decision makers and officials have been extremely busy in promoting the community’s interest during the past six months. The meeting of the bureau hosted in Providenciales by Chief Minister Taylor was an acknowledgement of the need for greater involvement of our associate members in the work of the Community. And at our intercessional meeting in Belize City in February, we shared the pride of the Cayman Islands in their admission as an associate member.

The expansion of the Community shows that we are striving towards the inclusiveness and truly representative nature with which a sub-regional organisation should approach the challenges being confronted by today’s Caribbean. We now welcome Haiti as a full member. Real challenges demand real Caribbean co-operation and we must not let differences in language, geography or any other consideration exclude the participation of Caribbean brothers and sisters in our work together on issues of common concern.”

“This great integrationist endeavour we are engaged in has but one supreme objective, to enhance the quality of life of our peoples. Not simply to lift them out of poverty, although that must remain our first goal, but to empower them to take control of their lives and to attain the highest levels of excellence in their cultural, political and economic existence. All this within a global context that tends to make the poor more wretched and the rich more powerful. You have only to consider that two years after the millennium declaration, set the goal of halving world poverty by 2015, there are more poor people today than there were then. The current form of globalisation is tightening, rather than loosening the international poverty trap. Low income for our export commodities leads to low savings, low savings lead to low investment and low investments leads to low productivity and low income. Only by working together can we break this vicious cycle.

I am conscious of my quasi-Cabinet responsibility for sustainable development within CARICOM when I say that our vision of what sustainable development is and the way we implement that vision is critical in determining whether we will achieve our supreme objective. We have recognised that our vision for sustainable development must be guided by a people centred approach. But is this just a hallow phrase? Are we consistent in our actions to give meaning to that policy by ensuring that people are directly involved in the decision-making process and in the implementation of programmes? To achieve that requires significant and continued refinement of our governing structures.

Let’s face it, our political systems are by and large inherited from another era and were designed to divide the many for rule by the few. If we are serious about building national consensus, about the critical issues affecting our societies, if we are serious about achieving sustainable development, we will have to change that and put in place new policies, structures and institutions that will make possible people centred development. The first question raised when such a goal is articulated, really it is a challenge to it’s possibility, is, but how can people who really know nothing about national and global economic realities be allowed to make decisions? That very question exposes our failure and poses the solution. Poverty is not simply the lack of material resources, but more fundamentally the lack of access to knowledge, technical knowledge, scientific and cultural knowledge, socio-political and economic knowledge. It is our duty to provide this access to our peoples. A conscious and educated people will know how to face the challenge of our evolving world order, one in which our economies made structurally dependent in the colonial era remain so in the present global system. This is what has made poverty persistent, but only because we have failed to make relevant knowledge accessible to all.