by TONY BEST

A CALL TO ARMS for Caribbean economic and social transformation but an absence of demands on rich nations and certainly no holding out of a begging bowl.

That characterised the opening of the United States Caribbean conference in Washington yesterday and a feature address delivered by Prime Minister Owen Arthur.

He addressed a capacity crowd that included almost every CARICOM leader, top executives of the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Bush Administration.

Arthur argued that with some of the world's highest debt obligations as a share of their economies, the Caribbean states shouldn't be forced to finance their development needs exclusively from their own resources.

As if those weren't enough, the region, now trying to grapple with economic challenges linked to the elimination of trade preference in Europe and North America, must face "a number of social and security threats which even now are weakening the social capital that has mattered so much hitherto to our development and are generating new risks that are eroding an environment of confidence that is so necessary for any society, large or small, to plan successfully the ordering of its affairs".

For instance, he listed a high incidence of HIV/AIDS, escalating crime in some countries and "the negative influences of some of our cultural imports" that were "shaping values and mature expectations".

Those developments had spawned an "an era of unprecedented challenges" which required consideration, especially from international financial institutions.

"The greatest challenge confronting the Caribbean," he added, "was to find a way to address what is essentially the post colonial economy. During the last decade, the region's long-standing trading arrangements for bananas, sugar, rum and rice to the markets of the European Union have been dismantled, marking an irrevocable point in our economic history."

In addition, trade concessions once provided by Europe, the United States and Canada had also "been significantly eroded by the sheer proliferation of bilateral and sub-regional trade pacts all across the world, which lock in for the participating countries greater market benefits than are available" to the Caribbean.

The problems and challenges didn't end there.

The Barbados leader pointed out that many of the countries were viewed as "relatively high-end developing middle income (states), which should be and are left to be financiers of our development".

In short, the spectre of economic marginalisation was stalking the Caribbean's landscape, Arthur said.

PM'S STEPS FOR CARICOM:

PRIME MINISTER OWEN ARTHUR has set out some steps CARICOM must take to meet the economic challenges facing it.

Delivering a feature address at the opening of the United States Caribbean Conference in Washington yesterday, he said CARICOM must:

*
reorient its economic production systems away from dependence on trade preference;

*  take a series of developmental steps that focus attention on the exploitation of areas of specialisation to meet a growing international demand that the region's human and other resources could meet;

*  transform its fiscal system in order to reduce dependence on taxes and trade in an age when trade liberalisation was undermining imports as a source of revenue. But that could only be done with international support;

*  must apply a new enterprise culture so that the various countries could develop enterprises that meet world standards "at the very outset" so they could look to competition rather than protection as the basis for viability;

*  should become more "entrepreneurial" based on public-private sector partnerships;

*  make investments in the institutional arrangements and the infrastructure to usher "our societies fully into the information age";

* expand investments in education and training to generate the human capital that would givethe region the edge and in so doing, apply a global focus in the way it conceives of human development;

*  protect the environment;

* put more into the health and well-being of the region's people; and

* create a culture that facilitates capital formation designed to create new enterprises and expansion of existing ones.