By Rickey Singh Caribbean analyst and columnist

	Caribbean Service closure as part of BBC's grant-in-aid funding cuts

Pan-Caribbean broadcast journalism is now set to suffer a major blow when the BBC Caribbean Service, which has been providing a most valuable package of news and views to this region for almost three decades, shuts down on March 25.

The BBC has explained in a press statement that closure of its Caribbean Service was part of its response to a cut to its "grant-aid funding" from the United Kingdom's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) that led to a restructuring of its World Service programmes.

Declining influence

It so happens, according to the official explanation, that BBC Caribbean has fallen victim to budgetary cuts that affect the World Service programmes in places like Albania, Macedonia and Serbia as well as Portuguese-speaking programmes in Africa.

Coincidentally, this development will also be occurring at a time when there continues to be a decline in Britain's interest and influence in the Caribbean.

For this region, closure of the BBC Caribbean Service is sad news.

The Caribbean Community will be the poorer for independent and reliable information as it is yet to recover from loss of the range and quality professional wire and radio news coverage that were a regular feature of a once vigorous Caribbean News Agency (Cana).

As we came to know it, Cana ceased to exist some 10 years ago. It currently offers, against the odds, a scaled-down news flow via the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC) which remains hobbled for want of proper funding arrangements, but still benefits from the commitment of a comparatively small band of professional journalists.

Going of Cana

While Cana was largely maintained financially with funding from UNESCO and a German foundation, the BBC Caribbean Service was to spread its wings as a project of the BBC World Service.

Now that the new Conservative/Liberal government in London has decided to cut grant-aid that affects even programmes of the BBC — that towering international symbol of a once glorious British empire — this region will be deprived of the very informative news, current affairs and other programmes, including an online component, offered by BBC Caribbean.

Given the recognised need for a greater public information flow, consistent with our aspirations to establish a seamless regional economy supported by enlightened functional co-operation, the impending closure of the BBC Caribbean Service was expected to be a discussion topic at the just-concluded Caricom leaders Inter-Sessional Meeting in Grenada.

Both host prime minister and current Caricom Chairman Tillman Thomas and his Barbadian counterpart Fruendal Stuart who chairs the Community's Prime Ministerial Sub-committee on CSME, are on record as expressing their interest for greater and more effective communication to the people of the region.

Well, since other Caricom leaders, among them the president of Guyana and prime ministers of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, should have no difficulties agreeing with such a perspective, the question is how to give tangible practical expressions to this felt need for "greater and more effective communication" with the people of the region, as distinct from a domestic orientation?

Today there is no longer a functioning Caricom Council of Information Ministers, or any showing of serious interest by governments to exercise creative initiatives to support, without strings, the Caribbean Media Corporation in order to be more enterprising in coverage of regional events and developments.

Today's challenge

Nevertheless, it would be good to learn that the Caricom leaders do have a concern in at least seeking to ascertain how best this region could benefit from the talents and resources, originally located in Cana, and now to be available with next month's closure of the BBC Caribbean Service where a small but very dedicated team of broadcasters and technicians has been providing the varied programmes of the BBC Caribbean Service.

Likewise, the decision-makers of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union and One Caribbean Media should also be forthcoming with ideas on the pooling of talents and resources to help in filling a growing void in sustained professional pan-Caribbean coverage of news and views in the interest of an informed regional public as efforts continue to scale hurdles to make a lived reality of the ideal of "One Community for One People".

In contrast to the authenticity that the word "Caribbean" has meant in the acronym of Cana and BBC Caribbean, media enterprises in the region that market themselves as being Caribbean-oriented have quite a challenge today with the coming closure of the BBC Caribbean Service.

For now, let the head of the BBC Caribbean Service, the veteran Trinidad-born journalist, Debbie Ransome, have the last word:

"Given what we know BBC Caribbean means for providing pan-Caribbean coverage for a strong radio audience, plus the online links it provides between the Caribbean and its Diaspora, and the amount of goodwill it brought for the BBC from a loyal audience, clearly a void will be left..."

Filling the void

So who will bell the proverbial cat among governments and the more enterprising entrepreneurs of the private sector to inspire interest in a mini version of a media enterprise that can fill the void left by what Cana used to be and is now made wider by the closure of the BBC Caribbean Service?

I guess it would be those with the imagination and commitment to encourage, as a matter of necessity, having an informed Caribbean public to better help governments, private sector and civil society in general to achieve and sustain defined national/regional goals.

If, warts and all, there are leaders in the public and private sectors yet to be sensitised to what it means for this region to suffer the loss of the pan-Caribbean communication services of, first the Montserrat-based Radio Antilles; then Cana Radio and its original wire service, and now BBC Caribbean, then the problems to ensure availability of a regular and credible pan-Caribbean flow of information, news and views may be quite great indeed.