The People's National Party, now in Opposition, is perceived to be the party of integration. The Jamaica Labour Party, on the other hand, is not instinctively regionalist. During his long tenure, its former leader, Edward Seaga, consistently questioned the worth and efficacy of CARICOM. Mr Seaga was notoriously suspicious of efforts to deepen regional integration, warning of "back-door Federation", out of which his party led Jamaica in 1961.

Bruce Golding, Mr Seaga's successor, and the current Jamaican prime minister, is no raving integrationist. In recent years, though, fortified by a heavy dose of pragmatism, he has drifted increasingly into the CARICOM camp. His party has followed with some reluctance.

"I do not believe," Mr Golding remarked to the Jamaica Exporters' Association recently, "that any of us can believe that we are going to swim in this Caribbean Sea on our own."

Discerning backers of CARICOM, given the context of Jamaica's relationship with its partners in the community, should rally behind Mr Golding, coaxing his greater embrace of the process. Which is why we find it so difficult to appreciate the failure by some - who should know better - to grasp the essential difference between Jamaica's legitimate complaints about trade barriers faced by its exporters in the region, and the shortcomings of domestic policy that have weakened the competitiveness of Jamaican producers. The one does not obviate the other.

Overzealous bureaucrat

The recent 'Patty Quarrel' between Kingston and Port-of-Spain over the latter's tardiness in allowing Jamaican patties into Trinidad and Tobago, may, indeed, have been the result of some overzealous bureaucrat who applied the country's phyto-sanitary law to the letter. But it was symptomatic of a larger issue: the need to have CARICOM function as a rules-based institution without need for private and personal interventions by friends and ministers for trade to flow.

It would be a battle of the ethereal, the establishment of vaporous combatants, were anyone to suggest it to be Kingston's argument that its problems were the result of a conspiracy by Trinidadian businessmen. Significantly, though, having made noise, Jamaica is achieving what a decade of effort in the councils of CARICOM had failed to deliver: work has begun on harmonised sanitary and phyto-sanitary rules for CARICOM, and Belize is soon to say how it will address its treaty-incompatible tariff that keeps out Jamaican beer.

Surely, as this newspaper has argued, there will be stresses and strains in CARICOM. In that regard, dispute-settlement regimes must not only be certain, but should be used, including, as we have already said, to test before the Caribbean Court of Justice, how Trinidad and Tobago should price natural gas in the community.

But groups like CARICOM are also inherently political, requiring a certain deftness and perception in management. It may be true that Jamaica's "borrow-and-buy" mentality helped shape its economic predicament, but part of that debt paid for US$1.68 billion worth of imports from CARICOM last year, against exports of US$66 million. Jamaica accounts for one-third of intra-regional trade.

That is a powerful backdrop from which to listen to Jamaica and the broader issues being raised by Bruce Golding.

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