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.
