Independence and size

19.SEPT.08

What size should a country be before it attempts to operate as an independent state all on its own? The British, in disposing of some of their oldest and smallest colonies, those in the Eastern Caribbean, drew the line at Montserrat. The French raised the bar, De Gaulle , on a visit to and speaking of Martinique and Guadeloupe, declared that independence cannot be granted to specks of dust. St. Vincent, while bigger than Montserrat, is smaller than Guadeloupe.{{more}} Our experience to date has been interesting.

The litmus test of a functioning state is the ability to maintain law and order. It is virtually impossible to do this in a democracy without a Supreme Court. SVG by itself has never been able to operate its own Supreme Court but has joined with neighbouring islands to form one. But even with this increase in size, the going has not been easy. At the outset the OECS had a very good Supreme Court with all the judges having been born in these islands. They were in fact children of the Empire. Legal luminaries who had served in Trinidad, Jamaica and West Africa, and when they came home, to the OECS Court were already in receipt of their colonial pensions. This, of course, could not last, and we have struggled to find judges at the Appeal Court level. Maintenance of law and order depends not only on judges but on the armed forces. Here, too, we have relied on a regional approach with the Regional Security Service.

The major problems we have had as independent states, however, have been in the field of Economics. These are the difficulties posed by limited resources and a tiny domestic market. With a cultivable area of only about 20,000 acres St. Vincent cannot by itself be an agrarian country. The biggest success we have had in agriculture has been with bananas, and to get this industry to work we had to integrate it with those of the other three Windward Islands.

With just over 100,000 people, not only is the domestic market very small, but so is the labour force, about 40,000, after we have deducted the children and the old. This has made it difficult to attract manufacturing.

We have, therefore, tended to concentrate on tourism. But hereto our limited human resources have posed problems. Local people have not done badly in establishing the smaller tourist facilities. With the larger ones we have had to rely on foreign enterprise. SVG does not attract many of the big chains. We often have to make do with adventurers. The Ottley Hall debacle is merely the starkest example of this. It is an ongoing battle separating the wheat from the chaff.

Even when we have a good foreign entrepreneur, we are soon told that our small labour force cannot provide the skilled personnel the resorts need and we have to recruit people from as far afield as Thailand and the Philippines. This leads one to wonder why we gave the enterprise tax concessions. Is it so that they can provide jobs for foreigners?

The Government has placed great emphasis on construction both to maintain a high level of economic activity and to provide the country with modern infrastructure. Here, too, our limited human resources have been very apparent. Nearly all the big local contractors are overstretched and taking for ever to complete projects.

Despite all the forgoing difficulties, SVG is not a failed state. There are certainly other countries closer to this status than SVG is. It all goes to show that Sir Arthur Lewis was right when he argued that there is no such thing as economic viability for a nation; if people decide their country will work, then it will work.

Our major strategy for making it work has been to forge integration links at several levels. Reference has been made to the Supreme Court, the Regional Security Service and the Banana Industry, but there are many other instances of it such as the ECCB, CDB, Caricom, LIAT, Drug Purchasing, the Caribbean Examinations Council, the University and Regional Negotiating Machinery. Not all the islands are involved in all the integration activities. There is a wide spectrum, from the University, in which all the islands participate, to WINBAN where we had only the four Windward Islands.

While further integration will not solve all our problems, it will certainly help. Perhaps we have now reached the stage where without a political dimension there can be no more meaningful integration. This may well not appeal to Jamaica. This is understandable. Apart from the University and the cricket team, the bonds between Jamaica and the Eastern Caribbean are rather slender. This has not been the case with the Southern Caribbean, particularly Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada and SVG. Here there has been a long history of de facto integration through trade and migration. A quarter of SVG’s imports, mainly industrial goods which we cannot ourselves produce profitably, come from Trinidad. For well over a century SVG has exported agricultural commodities to Trinidad.

But dry economics tell only half of the story. I was sent to secondary school by a mother who lived and worked in Trinidad. I have no Vincentian brothers but I do have three Trinidadian ones. I am certain I am not unique.

Let us, therefore, hail the four Prime Ministers who initiated this latest step in the integration process.