It is 50 years since the Federation was born; since The West Indies became, all too briefly, more than a geographic expression. However flawed the process by which we got there, however imperfect the consummation, however brief the period of promise, that moment of creation in 1958 was one of the worthiest in the history of the Caribbean region..

Download ‘Rough Handling Federation’ by Sir Shridath Ramphal

Download ‘EPA Ratification Procedures’

W. Bradford Wiley Professor of Economics, Colgate University

The debate over EPA was reminiscent of the kind of clash of ideas that occurred during the-hey day of the “New World” group of intellectuals and academics in the 1960s and 1970s. Then, as now, Caribbean integration and regional economic development were seen by these scholars as inseparable. But now in contrast to the past, the process of integration is not just an intellectual construct. There is a reality to the CSME and though it is not complete it provides a foundation upon which to build…. it might yet be possible to construct a broad Caribbean nationalist coalition…

Download Creating a Caribbean Development State by Jay R Mandle

GATT Article XXIV sets out a notoriously imprecise set of conditions under which free trade areas and customs unions are to be accepted as consistent with members’ obligations under the WTO Agreements. One of the most disputed elements is the phrase “substantially all trade” (SAT) which appears in the requirement that “duties and other restrictive regulations of commerce….are eliminated on substantially all the trade in products originating” in the partners….

Full Report

Critics argue that for over a decade, the United States has been striving to create commercial inroads into Latin America by way of bilateral free trade agreements that benefit U.S. economic interests to the detriment of those of Latin America. A recent example of this trend was the passage of the Dominican Republic – Central America Free Trade Agreement (DR-CAFTA), a pact designed to promote trade and foreign investment between the U.S. and its Caribbean Basin neighbors. ..When it was being negotiated, advocates of DR-CAFTA repeatedly assured skeptics that the agreement w as a “win-win” situation, arguing that it would economically benefit all countries involved…However, two years have now passed since some Central American countr ies implemented DR-CAFTA’s mandates, and governments, farmers, and workers across the region are beginning to suffer the consequences of an unfair deal. ..

 More

Ambassador Havelock Brewster, CCH, LL.D (Hon., UWI)

Havelock R. Brewster, a national of Guyana and Jamaica, has spent most of his career in international institutions and government service. He was until recently Executive Director for the Caribbean at the Inter-American Development Bank, Washington DC, and previously Guyana’s Ambassador to the European Union, Austria, Belgium, and Germany. Earlier, he served as Special Research Adviser and Director of the Commodities Trade Division of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, Geneva. Presently, he is Consultant to the Caribbean Development Bank, Hon. Professor of Economics at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, University of the West Indies, and Senior Associate of the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery. Ambassador Brewster is the author of a large number of journal and other publications in the field of trade, primary commodities, social and economic development analysis and policy, trade negotiations, development financing, economic integration and the Caribbean economy. He is a graduate in economics of King’s College, University of Durham, UK, and Dalhousie University, Canada. In 1993 Ambassador Brewster was awarded Guyana’s Cacique’s Crown of Honor (CCH) and in 2008 he was awarded the Degree of Doctor of Laws, Honoris Causa, of the University of the West Indies.

Sir George Alleyne, Chancellor of the Universirty of the West Indies, presents the Degree of Doctor of Laws , Honoris Causa to Ambassador Havelock Brewster at the UWI Mona  Campus on November 7, 2008. Following is Ambassador Brewster’s address to the Graduating Class.

Forty years ago, (the work of UWI social scientists) was greeted not as the “first port of call for regional leadership”, but with unprecedented hostility. The authors were hounded as communists, Marxists revolutionaries, conspirators with Fidel Castro, at best lunatics. The would-be reformers had passports seized, some expelled from the country, fired, threatened, and one assassinated…

Full address

Citation for Havelock’s Honorary Doctorate

For a functioning, participatory, Caribbean Democracy Stabroek News 17/11/08

]]> http://www.normangirvan.info/the-view-from-the-rear-view-mirror-havelock-brewster/feed/ http://www.normangirvan.info/david-de-caires/ http://www.normangirvan.info/david-de-caires/#comments Wed, 05 Nov 2008 02:17:45 +0000 norman http://www.normangirvan.info/?p=771 David de Caires–Witness to history and the search for a politics of meaning Stabroek News

The book is ‘dedicated to the people of Haiti, whose suffering continues’. The devastation brought by storms this year jas been catastrophic, and part proceeds from sales will be used to set up a Haiti Relief Fund in Trinidad and Tobago.

‘An Encounter with Haiti’ is published by Medianet Limited, 6 Maraval Road, Port Of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; email publisher@medianetcaribbean.com, Tel. 868-622-5394. It will be launched on Thursday October 16, 2008 at 7 PM at the Normandie, 10 Nooks Ave., St Ann’s, Port of Spain.

Table of Contents and Chapter One