As the country he leads celebrates the 37th anniversary of its independence, Tillman Thomas, Grenada’s Prime Minister, struck a note of optimism as he looked to the short and medium terms.
“Yes, 2011 can be a good year for Grenada. The focus for the country is on economic growth this year,” was the way Thomas put it to the Carib News. “We expect to see growth in the economy of about 2.15 per cent after experiencing negative growth for the last two years. We are seeing expansion of activity in agriculture.”
Like its Eastern Caribbean neighbors, Grenada, an upper-middle income as measured by the World Bank, is feeling the effects of the fall-out from the global economic crisis and the financial debacle that hit Wall Street in New York, the banks in London and the economies of Europe in 2008. But the Prime Minister, now the current chairman of Caricom, believes the worst is behind Grenada.
“There are some positive signs,” he said. “We are seeing a resurgence of activity in manufacturing, a 33 per cent expansion in that sector. Tourism is bouncing back with considerable cruise ship activity and we expect the sector to perform better than last year.”
Although some economists in and out of the Caribbean, including Byron Blake, a former top economist at the Caricom Secretariat in Guyana who later went on to be the senior economic adviser for the Group of 77 Developing countries and China at the United Nations, believe such forecasts for growth in the Caribbean as being overly optimistic, they believe that agriculture may hold the key to a return to some measure of prosperity in 2011.
“Agriculture is very important for the region’s future prospects,” said Blake. “There is nothing in the international economy that would lead us to believe there will be strong economic growth in the Caribbean this year. But the evidence shows that agriculture is once again taking its place” in the scheme of things.
Agriculture has always been important to Grenada, a nation of about 106,000 people who live on 133 square miles, about half the size of Dominica. Known as the “Isle of Spice,” the island has more spices per square mile than anywhere else in the world and while the contribution of agriculture to the overall economy has declined, going from almost 20 per cent in the 1990s to about 9 per cent by the middle of the first decade of the 21st century, the sector provides jobs for a large section of the labor force.
In the decades since Sir Eric Gairy led the then British territory to independence in 1974 and membership in the United Nations and am long list of other international bodies, Grenada has diversified its economy with services, especially tourism taking pride of place as the main earner of foreign exchange. Actually, tourism is the linchpin of the services sector which employs about two-thirds of the workforce and accounts for about 75 per cent of the economy.
This mountainous nation of three islands –Grenada, Carriacou and Petit Martinique – forms part of the Windward chain and it has weathered more than its fair share of economic and political storms. Its emergence as an independent state, the first in what is often referred as the OECS came at a time when the international community was debating the viability of “micro” states and for a time events in Grenada seemed to give credence to the ill-considered question of the skeptics who held that small nations couldn’t sustain sovereignty. But nothing could have been further from the truth. When a coup d’état, the only one in the history of the English-speaking Caribbean forced the Gairy Administration out of office towards the end of the 1970s, some analysts in and out of UN and the international financial institutions said “I told you so.” That view was bolstered in 1983 by the implosion of the People’s Revolutionary Government and the killings of the Prime Minister, Maurice Bishop, some members of his cabinet and others in the country. The troubles grabbed international headlines in much the same way that the events in Tunisia and Egypt are being closely watched by hundreds of millions of people in far flung corners of the world.
But Grenada proved the naysayers wrong. For it has shown how a small state can assume responsibility for its destiny, encounter rough patches but emerge stronger than ever. Even successive hurricane in the first decade of the 21st century when 90 per cent of the country’s buildings and infrastructure came tumbling down didn’t dampen Grenada’s spirit. The people set about the rebuilding task with enthusiasm and confidence and while the recent economic difficulties have slowed down the reconstruction phase, the independence anniversary finds Grenada in a positive frame of mind.
Later this month the country will play host to Caricom’s Prime Ministers and Presidents and Thomas who will preside over their deliberations, is committed to the idea of regionalism, the rule of law and fundamental democratic principles.