WHY MOON TOWN?
Monday, July 6th, 2009MOON TOWN IS AN ALTERNATIVE SCENERY TO OISTINS, CHRIST CHURCH AND OTHER NIGHT SPOTS IN BRIDGETOWN, BARBADOS.
EXPERIENCE THE DIFFERENCE FOR YOURSELF, YOU WOULD LOVE IT.
Archive for July 6th, 2009
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MONDAY’S SPECIAL
Monday, July 6th, 2009SALT FISH RICE; RICE AND PEAS; MACARONI PIE;
LINGUINE PASTA; ALFREDO SAUCE; CREAM YAM; FRIED CHICKEN; BAKED CHICKEN;
FRIED FISH; GRILL FISH; BAKED PORK; CURRIED FISH;
LAMB STEW; STEAMED VEGS AND SALADS….
Jamaica association makes its own proposals for immigration reform
Monday, July 6th, 2009PM urges Caricom to treat services symposium seriously
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T&T economy still at risk’ Caricom neighbours in turmoil
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Trinidad and Tobago’s stronger economic position makes it better able to withstand the shocks of the global downturn than its Caricom neighbours, a local economist has said. Dr Vanus James, speaking at a one-day seminar at the University of the West Indies yesterday, noted some of the unfortunate areas. “In Jamaica, bauxite is dead. All the plants have been mothballed. All over the region there is rising indebtedness,” he said. The panel, hosted by the Butler Institute of Learning and Labour (BILL), was brought together to discuss the global financial crisis and its impact on the Caribbean. James, who delivered an address titled “Structure and Consequences for the Financial System of T&T and the Caricom region”, said while the financial sector created the international economic downturn, it was the crash in oil and gas prices that began the meltdown. He said the accepted ideology that allowed free markets to guide the world showed “a fundamental flaw in the way we think”. But with a slow recovery taking place worldwide, he was quick to point out the positive circumstances of Trinidad and Tobago. “Yes, oil prices going up and that would help stabilise things in this country faster than everywhere else in the Caribbean,” he added. Nyahuma Obika, deputy political leader of the National Joint Action Committee (NJAC) and moderator, said capitalist systems played a part in the breakdown of the global economy. He described globalisation as a “sexy term” that people bought into but which led to free movement of capital and no barriers to trade. “That created a lot of greed. Greed was the stimuli to this whole situation and now Trinidad is on the brink of anarchy,” he said. Obika did not explain his statement further, but added that Trinidad and Tobago must not take comfort in the fact that its economy was in a better position than the rest of the Caribbean. “Our economy is tied to theirs. We need to remember that we are intrinsically linked,” he said. |
Caricom governance proposals for further discussion
Monday, July 6th, 2009Despite a warning by former Jamaican Prime Minister PJ Patterson that they needed to do something urgently about implementing decision, Caricom Heads meeting in Georgetown last week are still to take a concrete decision
Bruce Golding
The communiqué issued late Saturday night contained just one sentence on governance. It said, “Heads of Government reviewed the governance arrangements of the Community and expect to conclude their considerations on the basis of proposals to be advanced by the Secretary-General and the Task Force on Governance”.
Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding had told reporters on Friday that some “interesting ideas” had been discussed with regards to an implementation agency for decision-making in Caricom. He had said that he hoped that arising out of these ideas a platform would have been constructed on which the Heads might be able to “finally address this enormous difficulty of governance”. He added that he hoped that it gained traction.
He noted that if Caricom was not going in the direction of a political union “…then the challenge is to find a mechanism that works because right now where the void I think exists, is that the authority resides in (the Heads”. It doesn’t seem from the communiqué that this discussion went as far as had been hoped for by Golding.
At Thursday’s opening of the 30th summit of Caricom heads at the National Cultural Centre, Patterson had said that the community’s credibility had been wounded by the failure to implement solemn declarations year after year.
He said “the litmus test for effective governance is not measured by the decisions taken when heads meet, it is whether action follows…. The greatest threat to the credibility of Caricom lies clearly in the failure to implement solemn declarations and decisions made conference after conference”, Patterson declared, adding that he himself could not be absolved of this flaw.
Further, he stated that “mature regionalism will remain a pipe-dream unless authority is vested in an executive mechanism which is charged with full time responsibility for ensuring the implementation within a specified time frame of the critical decisions taken by Heads and other designated organs of the Community. For how much longer can a final decision be postponed on upgrading the institutional machinery if the community is not to become comatose?”
This argument goes all the way back to the 1992 report of the West Indian Commission chaired by Sir Shridath Ramphal – who was in the audience at the time that Patterson spoke – where an executive mechanism was recommended.
It was later taken up again the Rose Hall Declaration of the same date of last week’s conference six years ago but has not moved much since then. The Rose Hall Declaration had envisaged “The establishment of a CARICOM Commission or other executive mechanism, whose purpose will be to facilitate the deepening of regional Integration… The Commission’s function will be to exercise full-time executive responsibility for furthering implementation of Community decisions in such areas as well as to initiate proposals for Community action in any such area.”
Meanwhile, Saturday’s communiqué signalled the urgent need for the establishment of an “effective regional regime of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures”. The Heads mandated the committee on trade and economic development (COTED) to advise on arrangements for a Caribbean Agricultural Health and Food Safety Agency.
The Heads further agreed that “member states should extend to intra-regional imports of new food products treatment no less favourable than that extended to extra-regional imports of new food products, including risk assessments inspections”.
Jamaica had raised this as a serious point of concern noting that meat patties were having great difficulty entering the Trinidad market even though Kingston’s standards organization had been accepted by the European Union resulting in the grouping no longer having to inspect the island’s facilities.
“They have assessed them and they accept their work and yet our own Caricom partners won’t accept the certification from our standards organization”, Golding lamented.