Barbados' Leader of the Opposition, Mia Mottley, is urging the region to bond together and disregard sceptics who question the relevance of regional trading bloc, Caribbean Community (CARICOM).

"Without it, our lives will become more difficult," said Mottley last Thursday at a meeting of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ) in New Kingston.

Mottley, however, acknowledged that there are "functional issues" that CARICOM needs to address, saying some of the humbugs were the result of tardy implementation of decisions made by the bloc's highest decision making body, the heads of government, who meet twice in conference each year.

Time for unity

Mottley, in a strong argument that the regional integration not be allowed to disintegrate, said the Caribbean was dealing with one of the most challenging economic and developmental environments since independence, requiring that individual interests be set aside.

"The time for unity and purpose is now," she said.

"National prosperity in the Caribbean depends on regional integration," Mottley said.

Inherent advantages

Inherent advantages to integration are the elimination of some boundaries, and collaboration on issues of regional interest, such as a common transport policy, single telecommunications rates and a regional communication body that allows for the flow of real-time radio and television programmes.

Barbados' own economic success, Mottley said, was pinned on fundamental values such as access to free education from the primary to the tertiary level, democratic rule of law, maintaining stability and confidence and a strong capital base.

"No Barbados government can seek to govern without under-standing that free access to primary, secondary, tertiary and now pre-primary education is the basis upon which all our economic development must flow," said the Barbados politician, who was deputy prime minister under the former Owen Arthur administration.

"We had no choice."

Commitment to social capital

Mottley also noted that her country's commitment to social capital has extended beyond education to health care, subsidised transportation and a social-security network.

For more than 25 years, for example, Barbados has been offering unemployment insurance "as a central feature of our labour market such that when persons do face the unfortunate spectacle of unem-ployment there is that buffer to allow them to reintegrate back into the society," Mottley said.

Keeping crime in check

It feeds back, she told the PSOJ member's luncheon, to a stable country that can keep its crime rate in check.

"We have been able to over the last 15 years to bring back our crime statistics to what they were in 1989."

Robberies, for example, are a quarter of what they were in 1993, while burglaries are down by two thirds.

Mottley's call the region to seek prosperity through tighter bonds follows a call from regional private-sector groups to step up the implementation of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME).

Disenchantment increasing

The last nudge came in mid-July from the Trinidad and Tobago Coalition of Services Industries (TTCSI) at a CARICOM services sector symposium in Antigua.

"The private sector is becoming increasingly disenchanted with the pace of CSME implementation," TTCSI president Lawrence Placide.

Placide complained at the time that, even with the introduction of skills certificates, regional entrepreneurs still find it easier to enter a territory to provide services under the guise of going on vacation.

"It has been several years since CARICOM began to implement the free movement of persons, yet business persons continue to bitterly complain that entry into other CARICOM countries is still at the whim and fancy of immigration officers," he said.