INTRODUCTION or purposes of clarity, the focus here will be on the 14 former colonies of the United F Kingdom, plus Suriname (while Haiti became a member of CARICOM in 2002 it is not, in practical terms, an integrated part of the organization for reasons of history, language and culture). [...] Canada became active in the Caribbean when the British colonies - with the enthusiastic support of the ‘mother country’ - began acquiring independence in the sixties and seventies. [...] As this progressed, Canada, the UK, and the US made generous commitments to help the new nations develop their economies, in the expectation that they would eventually acquire a degree of self- sufficiency. [...] In the case of bananas, the end of preferential EU tariffs in 2012 as a result of the ‘banana wars’ with Latin America effectively ended the industry in the Caribbean. [...] The one organization that achieved some efficiencies of scale was the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), which allowed the micro-states of the Eastern Caribbean to share and rationalize certain services such as diplomatic representation.