Caribbean science under the microscope

As Latin American and Caribbean nations prepare for a major conference on Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development, organized by UNESCO and the Cuban government from 1 to 3 December, just how much of a 'science culture' is there in the Caribbean? The countries of the Caribbean Common Market (Caricom) would be the first to acknowledge that they need to make a lot of progress in absorbing and applying science and technology (S&T) if they are to improve their populations' standard of living. The problem is that, up until now, little attention has been paid to how this might be done. The conference is being held in Havana. Since Cuba is not a member of Caricom and since no study of Caribbean science would be complete without profiling the unique experience of this small, yet dynamic country, Cuba is the subject of a separate article.

As Latin American and Caribbean nations prepare for a major conference on Science, Technology and Innovation for Sustainable Development, organized by UNESCO and the Cuban government from 1 to 3 December, just how much of a 'science culture' is there in the Caribbean? The countries of the Caribbean Common Market (Caricom) would be the first to acknowledge that they need to make a lot of progress in absorbing and applying science and technology (S&T) if they are to improve their populations' standard of living. The problem is that, up until now, little attention has been paid to how this might be done.

The conference is being held in Havana. Since Cuba is not a member of Caricom and since no study of Caribbean science would be complete without profiling the unique experience of this small, yet dynamic country, Cuba is the subject of a separate article beginning on page 20.

The Caribbean is an archipelago of small and relatively young island nations in the Caribbean Sea, combined with a few neighbouring countries on the contiguous coast of Latin America. The island nations range from a size of 103 km2 (Montserrat) to 10 000 km2 (Jamaica).

The countries of the Caribbean are largely English-speaking, with the exception of Dutch-speaking Suriname, French-speaking Haiti and Spanish-speaking Cuba and the Dominican Republic. The English-speaking island nations have developed strong cultural, economic and educational ties through institutionalized mechanisms. For example, the University of the West Indies (UWI), founded in 1948, is pivotal to tertiary education for many of these island nations, whereas Caricom - not to mention the game of cricket - provide the 'glue' that binds the Caribbean people together.

Caribbean nations do however have diverse natural resources, economic policies and political strategies which have produced a considerable variety of economic, educational, industrial and cultural achievements.

•Wasted opportunity
All Caribbean nations, both individually and through Caricom, recognize they will have to make major progress in absorbing and applying S&T to improve their populations' standard of living. Little attention has been paid to how this might be done or to the roles played by different levels of scientific research: curiosity-driven versus application-targeted basic research and applied research directed towards problem-solving.

There seems to be no mechanism for setting research goals and priorities, judging whether any research goals have been met or evaluating research results from within and beyond the Caribbean for their potential beneficial impact on the lives and economies of the region. This is a very serious policy and management deficiency which must be remedied quickly if S&T and innovation are to become entrenched in the Caribbean culture and the productivity of the scientific enterprise is to grow to optimal levels. The lack of a conceptual framework for understanding and evaluating innovation in the region has meant that many research programmes have been established and maintained without any evaluation of how well they perform or of the requisite infrastructure, financial and human resources to complete their mission.

For this reason, bananas, sugar, alumina, tropical rainforests and other resources of vital economic interest to the region have remained poorly understood and their diverse potential is largely unexplored. What is most distressing is that there are significant earnings to be gained from economic activity in these areas but there is no endogenous research and develop-ment (R&D) capacity to sustain them. There are of course bright spots of excellent achievement in research in the region but this is largely a result of determined individual effort and initiative rather than a planned and sustained cultural movement towards regional or national scientific excellence in the economically vital fields.

Research is conducted in universities, national and regional publicly funded special research institutions and, to a limited extent, in the private sector. Examples of national research institutes are the Scientific Research Council in Jamaica, the National Agriculture Research Institute in Guyana and the Institute of Marine Affairs in Trinidad & Tobago.

•Modest R&D expenditure
Gross expenditure on R&D (GERD) is modest. Jamaïca, for example, devotes just 0.08% of GDP to R&D, St Vincent & the Grenadines 0.15% and Trinidad & Tobago 0.10%. Statistics show that the amount of funds actually available to R&D is proportionate to the tiny size of the Caribbean economies. In Jamaica, the Environmental Foundation of Jamaica, with normal funding of up to US$ 100 000 per project selected from peer-reviewed applications, is the most significant single source of substantial research funding. The Foundation supports environmental conservation, sustainable development and closely related research projects and promotions for which it has approved over US$ 8 million in support of 421 projects since 1948. The Commonwealth Caribbean Medical Research Council also provides small grants. Success in competitive funding awards from external sources is modest.

Commercialization of research results is a potential source of revenue and the region is active in intellectual property developments. Some encouraging examples are the sale of licenses in educational software by UWI to an international company, new food products turned out by the Scientific Research Council and the Small Business Incubators at the University of Technology in Jamaica. The Centre for Resource Management and Environmental Studies in Barbados has been responsible for developing sources of renewable energy, which were meeting 15% of the island's needs in 2003.

Recently, the region's academic institutions have attracted international companies to operate resident R&D activities. Funds earned from such arrangements are ploughed back into research infrastructure. In one case, this took the form of a significant contribution to a new 500 MHz NMR at the UWI in Jamaica. There is a similar arrangement at UWI's Cave Hill campus in Barbados with the company Biochem Pharma.

•Still a long way to go in scholarly output
The scholarly publication rates of research institutions outside the academic sector are insignificant. Of the research papers published by academic institutions between August 1999 and July 2000, approximately 92% originated from the regional research facility, the UWI, which has recorded significant growth in publication rates in the past decade or so. Overall, the region's 6.4 million inhabitants (excluding Haiti) published 460 papers in refereed journals: at 71 papers per million inhabitants, the figure is encouraging. It compares favourably with figures for Latin America identified in UNESCO's World Science Report 1996, which showed fewer than 50 research papers per million inhabitants for all but Argentina and Chile in 1993. Only the latter country, with a figure of 90, boasted a better publication rate than the Caribbean. Cuba in 1990 had a rate of 14 per million. This said, the figures for Singapore and Taiwan of China for the same year were 375 and 200 respectively, which means we have a long way to go.

Among the peer-review journals in which the region's papers appeared are periodicals from the region. These are concentrated mainly in five science journals, three of which are based at the UWI. First published in 1924, Tropical Agriculture is the region's longest surviving journal. The West Indian Medical Journal is the region's premier scientific journal; today, it reaches over 75 countries with about 700 individual subscribers and a circulation of over 2000. Like Tropical Agriculture, it is published quarterly. Published biannually by the Faculty of Engineering at the Trinidad Campus, the West Indian Journal of Engineering, which first appeared in 1967, has a very impressive list of international advisors/reviewers. Its contents though, are local to a large extent. The Jamaican Journal of Science and Technology, containing peer-reviewed papers in many fields, is published twice a year by the Scientific Research Council. The Bahamas Journal of Science is also published twice a year, in this case by Media Enterprises Limited.

•Special difficulties for R&D
The most serious difficulties are lack of funding, inability to attract and keep quality staff, and poor working conditions, including with regard to salaries, maintenance of equipment and staff development opportunities.
In Guyana and Suriname, these problems are acute, owing mainly to the very weak economies of these countries. In the UNDP's Human Development Report 2004, Guyana for example was ranked 104th out of 177 countries under the Human Development Index.

Very limited funds are available for research and the purchase and maintenance of equipment; weak infrastructure - including an unreliable supply of electricity - tests the patience of researchers. Moreover, only a few scientific journals are available to researchers.

Scientists at the universities in Guyana and Suriname also carry very heavy teaching loads, leaving them little time for research. To compound the problem, staff income is anything but attractive; this is reflected in the countries' inability to attract highly qualified scientists and the scholastically unproductive phenomenon of moonlighting. In the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Guyana, out of 33 full-time staff, only six have PhDs and some only a first degree. A paltry five international papers were recorded at this university last year. The situation in these two countries calls for intervention by the international scientific community.

The hub of scientific activities in Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad & Tobago centres around the campuses of the UWI. Scientists here are much more fortunate than their counterparts in Guyana, Suriname and in most countries of the Caribbean and Latin America. They enjoy better salaries and working conditions, as well as such fringe benefits as travel grants and access to limited internal research grants. The major need encountered here is mainly that of adequate research funding and better management of the scientific enterprise to match the productive potential of the academic staff and the science infrastructure.

•Brain drain expected to rise
The challenge of migration affects the Caribbean greatly. For example, in the years 1991-2000, Jamaica saw some 20 000-25 000 (close to 1% of the population) emigrate each year, according to the Planning Institute of Jamaica (2000). Some 11-15% of those migrating have skills or professions which might include S&T fields.

Emigration rates of professionals and skilled Caribbean people can be expected to rise unless working conditions and the state and productivity of the scientific enterprise itself improve in the near future.

•Lack of motivation unchecked for too long
There are also minor problems, such as poor staff retention, lack of a systemic approach to staff development, lack of short-term research attachments, recruitment difficulties in competitive areas like information technology and a seeming lack of motivation among some researchers which has gone unchecked for too long.
Substantive evaluation of research programmes and researchers themselves is lacking, as is action from management to combat mediocrity or a collective will to award differential benefits for highly productive researchers. This has stalled the development of an endogenous research culture.

•Making the Caribbean's voice heard
There are three regional scientific organizations in existence: the Caribbean Academy of Sciences, Cariscience and the Caribbean Council of Science and Technology. The latter was created by governments in 1981 with limited members drawn from policy makers and scientists. One of its first activities was to develop a S&T policy document for the Caribbean. Unfortunately, not much seems to have been done in the way of subsequent implementation.

There are a few well-established, active scientific associations, such as the Caribbean Chemical Engineering and Chemistry Association, the Caribbean Congress of Fluid Mechanics and the Caribbean Solar Energy Society.

The Caribbean Agriculture Research and Development Institute and the Caribbean Environmental and Health Institute are two of the better-known regional institutes. Guyana boasts a unique centre for research into inter-national forest conservation, Iwokrama, which encompasses 3600 km2 of lush pristine tropical rainforest in central Guyana. The centre receives research grants from a number of countries, as well as from international donor agencies, but has no core funding.

A Renewable Energy Centre in Barbados is on the cards. Speaking at the Caricom Task Force meeting on Regional Energy Policy in October 2003, Barbados Minister of Energy and Public Utilities Anthony Wood was quoted by the Barbados Advocate as saying that, 'a regional energy policy that focuses on sustainable development must be our objective for the development of the energy sector in the long term'. He stated that the Government of Barbados would like to have renewable energy contribute 30% of the island's primary energy by 2012.

The creation of a Regional Research Council to fund research of interest to, and focus on, regional problems has been proposed to the Heads of Caribbean governments, as reported by the Caribbean Academy of Sciences in 1998. At their annual meeting in 1999, these same governments endorsed a proposal by the UWI to establish a Caribbean Regional Research Agency. The Agency is not yet a reality.

Some of the region's leading scientists are now playing a major role in creating a science culture and developing a strong capacity in S&T. This is evidenced by a number of recent workshops and symposia in science education and a major Caricom conference on Harnessing S&T for Caribbean Development planned for 9-13 May 2006 in Trinidad & Tobago.

Ishenkumba Kawha and Harold Ramkissoon9

Adapted by the authors from a chapter on the Caribbean they contributed to the UNESCO Science Report 2005.

 

8. Disbursements for 1999/2000 amounted to US$ 1.8 million for 52 projects, according to the Planning Institute of Jamaica

9. At the UWI, respectively Prof. of Supramolecular Chemistry (Mona Campus in Jamaica) and Prof. of Mathematics (Trinidad campus). Prof. Ramkissoon is also Executive-Secretary of Cariscience and former President of the Caribbean Academy of Sciences