This Week in Europe, 6 October 2000
Executive Director of the Caribbean Council for Europe
If you are small, relatively powerless and faced with a threat, you react. Sometimes it is with anger or aggression. But more usually if you are unable to overcome difficulty through dialogue, a better approach is to seek alliances with friends or those more powerful who can help or protect you.
This is a theme as old as history and applies equally to individuals as it does to states. Survival in the medieval world centred on alliances cemented by marriage, mutual defence or payment. Then as now, treaties or other arrangements between states were designed to deter aggression. This process reached a zenith of subtlety during the cold war when both sides sought to maintain a balance of power or threat through measures that ranged from defence through institution building to hearts and minds campaigns.
The consequence was that most development assistance became a tool that provided smaller nations with support in return for food and energy security or other requirements. In this process, the strength and orientation of institutions such as trade unions, the private sector and non-governmental organisations came to be regarded as a central part of the success of one or another power bloc.
Today much of this has gone. Development assistance for all but the poorest has become in a globalising world, largely a function of trade. The argument most commonly used to justify this policy change towards regions such as the Caribbean is that by liberalising markets and competition, trade will increase, growth rates will improve and everyone will prosper, eventually.
It is, of course, a flawed argument and one that says nothing about the capacity of small, vulnerable nations ability to compete. It provides few answers as to how nations move rapidly from an agricultural or industrial base to a service led economy. And it says even less about the source of investment needed for transformation, or how a position of equity can ever arise between, nations as different as the United States and Dominica. The new trade-driven approach to development seems also to ignore the logical conclusion of the process. Which is, that it gives a relatively few nations with very large companies the ability to buy, control or sell unprofitable production in small economies and by extension have the power to close the economies themselves.
Over the last ten days there have been two very different opportunities to consider how institutions in the Caribbean might adapt and survive in this rapidly changing world. Interestingly, answers common at both events pointed to the vital importance of creating at an industry, trade union, local government or NGO level, strategic alliances (sometimes called smart partnerships) with non-traditional partners.
The first of the two meetings, held in Grenada on September 29 and 30 looked at alternative approaches to development. Representatives of regional private sector organisations, NGOs and others, considered whether there might be newer models of development able to increase the pace of change. What emerged from the case studies presented and a particularly interesting presentation from Mauritius’ Joint Economic Council, was that grass roots and market driven approaches based on partnerships might provide the key to creating new approaches to development.
At the meeting, organisations like Guyana’s Institute of Private Enterprise Development, which has created more than 30,000 new jobs, described how their success originated in a non-traditional alliance between Guyanese big business, some local philanthropists and small business, when faced with a crisis in the local economy. The Dominican Republic’s Agri-business Institute (JAD), noted that in their case it had been the production of high value agricultural produce, linkages to tourism and agricultural diversification that had stimulated farmers to forge an alliance with large foreign agri-business enterprises able to help develop and market local produce. Another example was that of CAST, a subsidiary of the Caribbean Hotel Association (CHA). They had provided technical assistance and funding for environmental programmes associated with small hotels by inviting onto their advisory board international companies who stand to benefit from any growth in regional tourism. While Mauritius explained how their industry, academic and technical institutions and government had all come together in clusters to deliver new development solutions.
The meeting in Grenada was followed closely by another in Barbados that emphasised the value that non-traditional strategic alliances have also had in trade negotiations.
On October 4, the West Indies Rum and Spirits Producers Association (WIRSPA) had their third formal exchange with representatives of the rum industry in the French DOM. Once sworn enemies, the two industries now work together in a strategic alliance, despite remaining in commercial competition. In practical terms the two industries support each other’s positions in their separate negotiations with the EU; make representations jointly on matters of trade policy or technical concerns; and seek through debate, consensus on common positions. As a result, ACP rum producers have inside the EU an organisation able to help raise joint concerns in ways that were thought previously impossible.
What all this points to is the need for new or lateral thinking about problem solving through alliances. For instance, the rice industry might progress their concerns in Europe by seeking, where possible partnerships with their EU counterparts or by developing strategic ties with major industrial consumers of rice. Similarly, Caribbean agriculture might obtain more benefit and retain its independence if it sought strategic alliances with major supermarket groups selling organic produce rather than continuing to pursue joint ventures.
There are now a small but significant number of regional alternatives to the traditional role models funded by grants or multilateral agencies. They are invariably low cost vehicles aimed at achieving solutions to immediate problems. Their success is often based on the drive and vigour of the individual that runs them. All are short of funding, but are unsure how much they want by way of support from multilateral institutions. They suggest instead that there is the need for some new type of venture capital fund able to provide the funding that their self-help programmes need if they are to have wider relevance.
Alliances need thought and can only proceed on the basis of mutual respect. Despite this, they offer a real alternative to the often bureaucratic, inflexible solutions proposed by most development agencies. What is still far from clear is whether such alliances can or should be promoted or whether they are simply needs-driven and represent a mature Caribbean response to pressing problems. What is striking, however, is that in contrast to Mauritius where Government and social partners actively work together with alliances, governments in the Caribbean have so far been unable to engage with or use either domestic or external partnerships as a tool to rapidly move forward regional economies. Why this should be requires an answer.