(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) There is a pressing need for a new perspective in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) that would address the achievements of the integration movement rather than the differences that overtime have been perceived as manifestations of disunity, His Excellency Edwin Carrington, Secretary General of CARICOM said Tuesday.

At a press conference to report on the outcome of the Twenty-Third Meeting of the Community Council of Ministers at the CARICOM Secretariat in Georgetown, Guyana, the Secretary-General reiterated that integration was “not an easy matter”.

In his address at the formal opening of the Meeting, Secretary-General Carrington had alluded to the Council’s role in dispelling much of the “doom and gloom” regarding the future of the Community.

Tuesday, he told representatives of the media that “every little issue” was perceived in a negative way; that differences of opinion were cause for alarm rather than matters on which the Community had to work together on; that the search for unity was termed disunity.

Integration, he stressed, created difficulties along the way and “we must work to come to acceptable solutions.”

Mr. Carrington pointed to the “additional problem of geography” and noted that the Member States of CARICOM, apart from Guyana and Suriname were all separated by sea. That “sense of separateness”, he said, added another dimension to the integration movement.

Chairman of the Council, the Hon. Wilfred Elrington, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade and Attorney General of Belize, called on the media to aggressively and thoroughly educate the Region’s populace about the “important issue” of integration.

Bearing in mind that the “Region belongs to all of us” and that ordinary people would be impacted by integration, Minister Elrington said they needed to be informed as comprehensively as possible.

The Minister said he was looking forward to “great things from the Region”, following a very successful Meeting of the Council. He said that CARICOM was an organization of which he was very proud, and lauded the CARICOM Secretariat for “doing a marvelous job”.