French Guiana Officially Joins CARICOM as Eighth Associate Member

The Caribbean Community and Common Market (CARICOM) has welcomed its newest member, with French Guiana officially becoming the eighth Associate Member of CARICOM following the signing of the membership agreement on Monday — a milestone that expands CARICOM’s footprint to include the South American territory for the first time.

The Agreement defining the conditions for granting Associate Membership was signed by CARICOM Chair the Honourable Philip J. Pierre, Prime Minister of Saint Lucia, and His Excellency Gabriel Serville, President of the Territorial Collectivity of French Guiana, during proceedings in Castries, St. Lucia.

French Guiana will now participate in the 51st Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of CARICOM, currently underway in Saint Lucia — taking its seat at the regional table for the first time as an official member of CARICOM.

French Guiana, a French overseas territory located on the northeastern coast of South America bordering Brazil and Suriname, is home to a diverse population with deep historical, cultural, and economic ties to the Caribbean. Its accession to Associate Membership formalises a relationship that has long existed informally through geography, migration, trade, and shared heritage.

As an associate member, French Guiana joins Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands — territories that participate in CARICOM’s deliberations and benefit from certain aspects of regional cooperation while maintaining their existing constitutional relationships with their metropolitan governments.

The addition of French Guiana is particularly significant in the context of CARICOM’s broader efforts to strengthen regional integration and cooperation, including recent discussions on aviation harmonisation, electric vehicle standardisation, and the management of shared challenges such as climate change, sargassum, and disaster preparedness.

For Antigua and Barbuda, which recently signed a regional aviation cooperation memorandum with the French Civil Aviation authorities and which has long-standing ties with French Caribbean territories, the formal inclusion of French Guiana in the CARICOM family represents another step toward the kind of comprehensive regional integration the Community was designed to achieve.