World Ignores Caribbean Single Market Economy Inauguration

Last week, Barbados Prime Minister Owen Arthur met with leaders from Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad & Tobago, Belize and Suriname and signed the Declaration of Entry into the Caribbean Single Market Economy.

The world’s reaction? A collective yawn.

Perhaps the PM and his government could use some instruction on how to promote Barbados? It seems to me that any good wedding planner should have been able to achieve better promotional results than that achieved by Mr. Arthur & Company.

At Barbados Free Press, our lovely Shona did web searches all week looking for reaction to CSME in the world’s financial and news media – without success.

Here is the sad tale of the brilliant promotional work accomplished by the Barbados Government and all the Ministries…

The Wall Street Journal? Nothing.

CNN Financial News, International Herald Tribune Business, Washington Post, New York Times, MSN Money. All Nothing.

Financial Post – National Post (Canada), Globe & Mail (Canada) Financial Times (UK), The Economist (UK), The Times (UK), The Guardian (UK), Euromoney (EU), China Daily Business, South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), Japan Times, The Nikkei (Japan). Nothing.

As expected, the BBC Caribbean Bureau published a little fluff piece about the signing – but nothing of substance. Associated Press did the same. Black Britain published a story on the signing that quoted Prime Minister Owen Arthur (very well, I thought). That minor story was linked to by the American black-conservative blog Booker Rising.

That’s it for the major media, folks! (And we even stretched the definition of “major media” for that one.)

Several minor Caribbean blogs discussed signing of the Caribbean Single Market Economy pact as detailed by Georgia Popplewell at Global Voices – who made what is probably the most telling find…

Even the “Talk CSME” blog didn’t cover the Inauguration meeting.

What a pathetic joke.

Andy The Hobo Traveler Hits the Caribbean – Maybe Barbados

For those not familiar with Andy the Hobo Traveler and his blog, now might be a good time to have a look as he is in Trinidad and might be stopping in Barbados. For the last 9 years, Andy has been traveling the world as a “hobo”: making his living by writing a blog of his travels to 66 countries at last count.

We have followed his adventures through Africa and Asia – lost in Nepal, chased by a lion in Kenya and frightened to death in Iraq. Yes, Iraq as a tourist. Andy is 49 years old, looks about 15 years younger and hardly had a dollar to his name until his started his blog and began posting Google AdSense advertisements. Now, his blog is rated by Forbes as the Number 5 Travel Website in the World with over 10,000 photos personally taken, 200 newsletters published to 7000 subscribers and almost 2000 blog entries read by over 10,000 people daily.

For all his success and even fame at writing, Andy is the first to admit that he is a horrible writer – even childish and uneducated.

But he has a special something that makes 10,000 people visit his blog each and every day. Check it out.

Photo: Andy in Laos