BASSETERRE, St. Kitts – PRIME MINISTER Dr. the Hon. Timothy Harris is inflexibly wedded to the belief that there is hope for the future of the Regional Integration Movement.
He made this pronouncement, among others, during his address at at the Annual Prime Minister’s Lecture at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies in Barbados on Thursday night (Mar. 31).
The event was organised by the UWI Students Today Alumni Tomorrow Vice Chancellor’s Student Ambassador Corps under the theme ‘Reaping the rewards of Regional Integration: A Socio-economic Assessment’.
The Prime Minister had cited the Caribbean economies as the central issue in this particular aspect of his address to the students and special invitees at the event.
“History tells us that in the beginning the Caribbean was at the intersection of the global economy. It was the epicentre of wealth creation for the West with slavery and sugar playing the basis for industrial revolution that catapulted European development. But the configuration of Caribbean economies was structurally designed then to serve and feed the economies of the West.”
Dr. Harris emphasised that it was because of that system eminent Caribbean’s development theorists, such as the late George Bedford, had described the region’s economies as “plantation economies”.
He added: “It didn’t matter whether the plantation was of sugar or banana, or the plantation was of hotels. The essence of the challenge in reconfiguring the economy was how to move these economies from structural dependence to a different value chain in which the value added was done indigenously and earned locally.”
PM Harris pointed out that while globalisation has many advantages, it has created some degree of disadvantage for small nations such as the Caribbean. He however, stressed that success of the Regional Integration Movement is heavily dependent on the interest of elected Caribbean leaders.
“Today’s global reality is that while the process of globalisation has made many national boundaries useless, and while in many ways the world has become a much flatter place, the struggle for competitive advantage has gotten more and not less difficult.
“In every part of the world nations are grouping together to preserve individual strength through collective cooperation. Even the world’s most populous countries and its most prosperous economies are creating hegemonic blocks. In Asia, in the Northern Hemisphere, the Pacific region, the European Union, all of these we have had countries coming together in an effort to create advantage with wider global arena.”
Dr. Harris is an alumnus of the Cave Hill Campus, having graduated from the learning institution with a First Class Honours Degree in Accounting and winning the coveted Victor Cooke Award of Best Accounting Student in 1988.
Following that success, in 1992 he graduated from the St. Augustine Campus of the UWI in Trinidad and Tobago with a distinction in the Master’s Degree Management Studies Programme.
Because of his excellent performance, UWI, in collaboration with the Canadian International Development Agency, sponsored him participation in the PhD Programme which involved four universities in Montreal, Quebec, Canada - Concordia, Mc Gill, University of Quebec at Montreal and Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales.
