Durrant Pate/Contributor

CARICOM Heads of Government and the regional private sector have agreed to concrete actions on affordability at the Second High-Level Breakfast Dialogue in Castries, St. Lucia, earlier this week.

The high-level meeting between the OECS Business Council, CARICOM Private Sector Organisation (CPSO) and CARICOM Heads of Government was convened at Sandals Grande, Saint Lucia. The meeting was convened under the theme, “Meeting the Affordability Challenge: Toward a Proactive Agenda for Member States and the Private Sector” on July 6, 2026, in the margins of the 51st Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community. 

The dialogue brought together more than one hundred and twenty senior representatives of the CARICOM private sector with Heads of Government from eleven of the 13 Member States, Caribbean Congress of Labour, development finance partners including the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), the Caribbean Development Bank and the CARICOM Development Fund and other regional institutions.

Held against the backdrop of rising cost-of-living pressures across the region, participants examined practical measures to improve affordability by removing barriers to intra-regional trade, reducing transportation and logistics costs, diversifying imports, and mobilising regional investment capital. They also looked at strengthening tourism linkages and addressing the disproportionate negative impacts of the International Maritime Organisation’s Net-Zero Framework on CARICOM Small Island Developing States. 

Strong consensus moving beyond policy dialogue 

The discussions reflected a strong consensus that regional governments, the private sector and organised labour must move beyond policy dialogue to coordinated implementation, supported by clearly defined mandates, timelines and measurable outcomes. Key Outcomes and Takeaways: Regional Travel and Maritime Transport: Dominating the morning’s discussions was the urgent need to resolve the Region’s inadequate transport capacity, which continues to constrain the CSME commitment to the free movement of people and goods. 

The session agreed on a September 2026 deadline for creation of the enabling regulatory framework for the mutual recognition of insurance, licences and road taxes, essential to finalising arrangements for the regional ferry service to be operated by the private sector. In the interim, CARICOM Heads determined that an earlier pilot ferry initiative will be pursued, utilising a vessel that the Government of Trinidad and Tobago has expressed its willingness to deploy to launch the service. 

Trading issues discussed

The session also registered satisfaction at the commencement of service by Executive Air Cargo, which has begun transporting agri-food products among Member States. Non-Tariff Barriers: Turning to the barriers within the Region’s own control, the session adopted a ‘pairwise’ model of direct engagement between the Member States implementing the 57 non-tariff barriers (NTBs) identified by the private sector as suppressing intra-regional trade, and the Member States affected by them. 

The model will be implemented under the leadership of a Lead Head of Government, with the active participation of the private sector and the relevant ministerial and regulatory institutions, and with implementing and affected States committing to time-bound remedial actions. Import diversification: The Breakfast Meeting benefitted from a presentation of technical work on reducing the cost and increasing the benefits of diversifying and de-risking CARICOM’s imports. 

It noted that the Region stands to realise expected savings of circa USD 2.0 billion from the diversification of a component of its non-fuel imports alone and recognised the scope for still greater savings from reduced fuel imports as the Region transitions to renewables. The CPSO was urged to undertake further work on the fuel import-energy transition nexus, as a matter of immediate priority. 

The session discussed short-term measures to ease the cost-of-living pressures bearing on CARICOM households. 

Tripartite compact among Governments 

Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, made an explicit call for a formal tripartite compact among Governments, the private sector and organised labour, covering a basket of essential products. She also called on the private sector to accept lower profits on essential goods to ease the cost of living for CARICOM citizens. The need for further discussions with the contribution of ideas from all quarters was recognised. 

The session then turned from costs to capital, endorsing the urgency of creating a bridge between the surplus liquidity held by regional financial institutions and strategic investment opportunities in desalination, battery storage, solar, wind and geothermal power generation, and port facilities. Recognising that the people of CARICOM remain largely unaware of these opportunities, the session endorsed their publication on a common regional platform as a necessary first step.

Investment opportunities in agriculture were singled out for listing on the platform, and a request was made for a compendium of CARICOM-wide agricultural investments to be presented at the next High-Level Breakfast Forum. In the same spirit of building regional value chains, the session renewed its support for completing the Tourism Linkages Project mandated by the 48th Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government to strengthen the connections between tourism and regional agriculture, manufacturing and services.