By Sir Shridath RamphalToday, 23 years after Grand Anse, it is interesting that among the 13 specific actions enumerated were:• Arrangements by January 1991 (21 years ago) for the free movement of skilled and professional personnel as well as for contract workers on a seasonal or project basis; and• immediate and continuing action to develop by 4 July 1992 (20 years ago) a regional system of air and sea transportation including the pooling of resources by existing air and sea carriers conscious that such a system is indispensable to the development of a Single Market and Community.How do we feel about these commitments now? Both their specific undertakings and their promises of fraternity, when in our time irritations and worse are the daily experience of West Indians at West Indian immigration counters, and affordable travel in their Caribbean homeland remains the dream of our one people? Can we just shrug off these commitments of two decades by simply saying: ‘well, that was then’? If that is so, what is now? Where are we going, and who is the pied piper calling the tune?I do not intend to traverse the ground covered by the West Indian Commission’s Report, Time for Action (also mandated by Grand Anse), save to recognise that when its recommendations came to be considered at the 1992 CARICOM Summit here in Port of Spain, Prime Minister Robinson was gone from office; and with him the light of Grand Anse seemed to have gone out of the Region.Later that year, Trinidad and Tobago’s new Prime Minister Patrick Manning, as CARICOM’s Chairman, wrote the West Indian Commission. It was a letter of encouragement. He assured us that it was the firm determination of CARICOM Heads to continue to give most serious consideration to all aspects of the Report.Suffice it to say that, over the last 20 years, such ‘serious consideration’ did not induce acceptance of the Commission’s crucial recommendation for a central executive authority to ensure implementation of the decisions taken together by CARICOM Heads in their collective sovereignty.They came close to doing so at Rose Hall in Jamaica on CARICOM’s 30th Anniversary in 2003 under the Chairmanship of Prime Minister P.J. Patterson; but qualified their conclusion to develop ‘a system of mature regionalism’, along the lines urged by the West Indian Commission, by calling it ’an agreement in principle’. Nothing more happened to that ‘Rose Hall Declaration’; it simply joined the already long list of forgotten CARICOM Declarations, Affirmations and Commitments.But what of Grand Anse and the specific decisions on the Caribbean Single Market and Economy?A year ago, the Institute of International Relations of the University of the West Indies here at St Augustine – as I recall, very much the creation of Eric Williams — conducted a study of the region’s record by some of the most eminent scholars on the Caribbean. It is the most authoritative contemporary commentary on the state of Caribbean integration – the state of the vineyard. Entitled Caribbean Regional Integration, its Executive Summary said the following:“There was a real sense that the optimistic era of Caribbean integration may well have passed just at the time when it is most desperately needed. The difficulties facing the region are no longer simply about competing effectively in a globalising economy.Rather, they are ‘existential threats’ which bring into question the fundamental viability of Caribbean society itself. Climate change, transnational crime, the decline of regional industries, food security, governance challenges, international diplomacy and so on are problems which can only be effectively addressed by co-ordinated regional responses.Moreover, these problems are becoming increasingly acute in the immediate present; failure to act immediately, decisively and coherently at the regional level could quite conceivably herald the effective decline of Caribbean society as a ‘perfect storm’ of problems gathers on the horizon.The regional leadership is seen as critical to either the continued deterioration of the integration process, or its re-generation. … This report is therefore timely in terms of both its recommendations and the window of opportunity that has opened for the region – and especially the Heads of Government (HoG) – to seize the integration initiative.It cannot be stressed just how critical the present juncture is; this may well be the last chance to save the formal integration process in the Caribbean as we know it,Sale NFL Jerseys, and to set the region on a new development path. Another opportunity might not present itself in the future.”The study was available before last year’s CARICOM Summit in St. Kitts; but there is no indication that Caribbean Heads took notice of it. Certainly their decision to ‘pause’ the integration process; slow down the pace a bit, as the Chairman insisted, is at total variance with the Study’s call for