OAS Private Sector Initiative of the Americas
Statement on Behalf of the CARICOM Private Sector
Dr. Patrick Antoine | CEO and Technical Director, CARICOM Private Sector Organization
Thursday, 3 September 2026
Secretary General Ramdin, Chair Bulgheroni, Distinguished Colleagues,
In the Caribbean, we do not debate whether prosperity and peace are connected. We live it.
When a single hurricane can erase a year’s GDP overnight; when one disrupted shipping lane raises the price of food on every shelf in fifteen countries; when correspondent banks withdraw and the cost of simply moving money climbs; when our economies import what we could grow, ships bypass ports we could connect to, and pay energy costs designed for continents not islands, the distance between an economic shock and a social crisis is measured in weeks, not years.
Prosperity, for small states, is not the reward of stability. It is the condition for it.
That is why the CARICOM Private Sector Organization (CPSO) embraces this Initiative, and why we come to this table not with requests, but with work already in motion.
Six weeks ago, the CPSO stood before the Heads of Government of CARICOM and presented our Derisking CSME Imports methodology for unshackling trade potential: hard data mapping exactly where our Community is exposed to external supply shocks, and exactly how enabling intra-regional trade corridors can close those gaps.
Not a study for a shelf. Approaches to meeting the grinding challenge of affordability, tools being used now, and a model that could scale across this hemisphere, where intra-regional trade, as the Panama dialogue rightly diagnosed, remains far below its potential.
Our Heads of Government are advancing a Regional Ferry Service to finally stitch our islands together by sea. With development partners, we are addressing high maritime transport and trade costs, food security gaps, and non-tariff barriers that operate as a hidden tax on every
Caribbean household. And at the International Maritime Organization, the CPSO is collaborating with CARICOM Member States to ensure that global shipping’s energy transition does not arrive as a bill that small, fuel-importing economies cannot pay.
De-risking trade. Connectivity. A just energy transition. These are not aspirations. They are CARICOM’s answer, already underway, to the very question this Initiative poses.
So our submission is direct.
First: build CARICOM in at the design stage. Fifteen Member States. A single market. A private sector organised and ready. We are not a footnote to a Latin American conversation. We are a distinct constituency, with distinct exposure, and with solutions already tested at the level of our Heads of Government.
Second: as the 120-day Action Agenda takes shape, let it carry measurable commitments on the three fronts I have named, and let those commitments reach the micro, small and medium enterprises that make up the overwhelming majority of firms in our region. An Agenda that works for the most vulnerable economies, and the smallest firms, in this hemisphere will, by definition, work for all of them.
Third: use what exists. Give the private sector a standing seat in this Initiative, not an episodic one. And enable our sustained participation!
Our CPSO brings data, methodology, and a mandate from our Community. We are not asking this Initiative to invent the Caribbean’s priorities. We are offering to deliver them, together.
The Secretary General has said that prosperity is an investment in peace.
In the Caribbean, we would add only this: nowhere in the Americas will that investment yield a higher return.
Thank you.