COMMENTARY: We’ve Called the Meeting. Now Here’s What We Bring

By Fletcher St. Jean, MBA · St. Jean & Company

The EU has told five Caribbean governments to shut down their Citizenship by Investment programs by 2028. The Prime Ministers have agreed to go to Brussels.

The decision is right. What they bring into that room will determine whether the Caribbean loses a revenue stream or gains a trade compact. The preparation is everything.

Last Friday, in Roseau, Dominica, the Prime Ministers of Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent and the Grenadines agreed to go to Brussels.

They will seek meetings with the President of the European Commission, the President of the European Council, and the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy.

They have directed their foreign ministers, ministers responsible for CBI, ambassadors and senior officials to coordinate a unified regional position. This is the right decision. It is also the beginning of the hard work, not the end of it. What happens in that room depends entirely on what the region brings into it.

This piece is offered in that spirit — not as commentary, but as preparation. The case the region needs to make is not the compliance case, though the compliance work is real. It is the strategic case: one that reframes the conversation from defense to proposal, and arrives at the table with something concrete enough that the EU must choose to accept or refuse it, publicly, before the international community.

Be clear-eyed about the terrain. Commissioner Magnus Brunner’s letter of June 25 states that operating a CBI program is now, in itself, a ground for reviewing Schengen visa-free access — “regardless of how well it is managed.” Those four words are the most important in the letter. The concern is no longer administrative. It is principled. ECCIRA — the Eastern Caribbean’s new unified CBI regulator, headquartered in Grenada and operational this year — was built to answer the compliance question as well as it can be answered. The EU’s reply is that compliance is not the question being asked.

This is a reason for clarity, not despair. The region should not walk into Brussels debating it has cleaned up the programs — that debate runs into a wall that will not move. It should walk in lobbying for something Brussels has not yet been compelled to address: what a genuine partnership requires in exchange.

The region’s strongest position is not a defense of CBI. It is an exposure of the asymmetry. If these programs are wound down as Brussels wishes, the European Union and the United States secure the integrity objective they have sought. The Eastern Caribbean absorbs the entire fiscal cost. Dominica loses revenue equivalent to roughly 37% of its GDP. St Kitts and Nevis, whose 2024 fiscal deficit already widened to about 11% of GDP as CBI revenue fell, faces a structural hole with no replacement in sight. Five small governments lose the financing that has built their hospitals, airports, climate-resilient housing, and fiscal buffers. The EU gains; the Caribbean pays. That is not a partnership outcome. Saying so, plainly and without anger, is the first thing the region should do when it sits down.

The second thing is to make the ask — not for compensation, which is a supplicant’s position, but for trade.

The instruments already exist: the CARIFORUM–EU Economic Partnership Agreement, the Samoa

Agreement, the Global Gateway framework. What the region needs is for those instruments to be made concrete, binding, and matched to goods it can deliver. Guaranteed, long-dated market access for Caribbean agricultural produce and value-added goods — paired with EU support for the infrastructure investment required to deliver them — is a settlement both sides can defend. The EU deepened its development partnership; the Caribbean traded a revenue stream for a permanent economic compact. That is a negotiation, not a capitulation.

The region should arrive with a specific proposal. The following elements belong in it.

A phased transition framework, not a cliff. A hard stop in June 2028 with nothing behind it is not a transition; it is a fiscal crisis. The region should propose a structured, negotiated wind-down — moving toward residency and investment models that satisfy the EU’s safeguards while preserving an orderly inflow of investment capital through the adjustment period. Three to five years, with defined milestones, is a reasonable ask.

Binding agricultural trade access. European preferences once sustained the Windward Islands banana industry. When those preferences were withdrawn, the region learned how quickly an economy built on a single external decision can hollow out. The region should not repeat that lesson — it should use it. A specific, binding commitment to expanded Caribbean agricultural and agro-processing access to EU markets, with defined volumes and timeframes, is the core of the trade compact the region needs.

A Caribbean Development Partnership facility. The EU’s Global Gateway already speaks the language of development partnership. The region should ask for a dedicated Caribbean facility under that framework, seeded by the EU and matched by CDB and ECCB resources, targeted at the exact infrastructure

— cold chain, packing capacity, port upgrades, phytosanitary certification — that makes expanded trade possible. The EU funds the door; the region builds what goes through it.

Climate resilience co-financing. Small island developing states bear a disproportionate cost of climate change they did not cause. The Roseau communiqué named climate resilience as a discussion topic. It belongs in the compact as a specific, quantified commitment, not a general aspiration.

Three things about posture matter as much as substance. First, go as one. The unified position the Roseau meeting called for is not optional — it is the entire premise of the negotiation. Five separate conversations give Brussels five opportunities to divide the region. One voice, one proposal, one mandate is the only configuration that carries weight. OECS Chairman Prime Minister Gaston Browne and incoming CARICOM Chairman Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre should lead jointly — which signals that this is not a sub-regional grievance but a Caribbean-wide position.

Second, bring the numbers. Every element of the proposal should carry a figure: the fiscal impact of a hard stop, the revenue replacement required, the investment the region commits to make, the market access volumes it is asking for. Specificity signals seriousness. Vagueness gives the other side room to agree in principle and deliver nothing in practice. The region has lived that experience before.

Third, engage the history — calmly, not as grievance. The banana industry. The financial services pressure of the late 1990s. The correspondent banking crisis. These are patterns, not accidents, and naming them is context for why the region is asking for a framework with teeth rather than a framework of intent. A partner

that has watched solidarity give way to European interest when the two conflicted is right to ask for something binding this time.

The CDB’s decade of decision estimates a regional financing need of some US$65 billion to 2033 simply to prevent stagnation. The ECCB’s Big Push calls for doubling the Eastern Caribbean’s economy within a decade. Both frameworks assume the region can mobilize capital and sustain public investment. A disorderly fiscal cliff makes both harder. A negotiated compact — trade access, phased transition, development co-financing, logistics investment — makes both possible. The two goals are not in conflict. What they require is a plan.

And that is the word this moment demands above all others: plan. Not a communiqué. Not a statement of intent. A specific, costed, legally grounded economic transition strategy — one that names the revenue to be replaced, the industries to be built, the trade volumes to be negotiated, the infrastructure to be financed, and the timeline against which all of it is measured. The Caribbean has been forced to transition before. What it has rarely had is a transition plan prepared in advance, before the cliff arrives, with the analysis to back it.

St. Jean & Company has begun that analysis. The transition and diversification roadmap the firm has been developing since 2020 — aligned with the CDB’s decade of decision and the ECCB’s Big Push — is designed precisely for this moment: to give the panel the analytical foundation it needs to walk into Brussels with figures, not feelings; with proposals, not pleas; and with a map of where the region is going, not just a defense of where it has been. That work is available to the panel, and the firm stands ready to extend it into a full advisory engagement.

The Roseau meeting was the right call, made quickly. This is the Caribbean doing what it has always done

— finding its footing when the ground shifts. The difference this time is that the ground has not yet fallen away, and there is still time to choose the landing. That window will not stay open indefinitely. It is preparation time. Let us use it well.

St. Jean & Company has been developing a transition and diversification framework for the Eastern Caribbean since 2020, aligned with the CDB’s decade of decision and the ECCB’s Big Push strategy. The firm advises regional institutions, and investors on economic strategy and transition planning, and is available to support the preparation work the Brussels mission requires.

THE CARIBBEAN LEDGER — Independent analysis of Caribbean finance, economics, and the forces shaping the region. Launching November 2026.

Advertise with the mоѕt vіѕіtеd nеwѕ ѕіtе іn Antigua!
We offer fully customizable and flexible digital marketing packages.
Contact us at [email protected]