NAIROBI, Kenya, Dec 9, CMC – The African Caribbean and Pacific Group (ACP) opened a two-day summit here on Monday with Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley urging the 79-member grouping to reflect on its continued relevance in a changing global environment.
“I stand here colleagues, I ask the question: Does the ACP at this point of our destiny stand as a fast track to the future, or is it a relic of the past?” she told the opening ceremony of the summit being held under the theme “A Transformed ACP: Committed to Multilateralism”.

Apart from Mottley, Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness is the only other Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leader attending the conference. Mottley, speaking on behalf of the Caribbean, said that institutional arrangements are hard to change, and very often it takes “a crisis of legitimacy; a moment of illegitimacy” for this to happen. She pointed out that the Group of Seven (G7) largest International Monetary Fund (IMF) advanced economies became the G20 “not because of a planned democratic evolution in the affairs of global governance, but rather because the global financial crisis required a global response.

“It became immediately obvious that the G7 was totally inadequate to the task,” she said, suggesting that in the 21st Century, the old institutional configurations underlying the ACP-Europe Union relationship, “are irrelevant to the present and to the future. “Our rapid economic growth and the looming climate crisis demand a reorientation of the constellation of our relations. The post-Cotonou negotiations have forced the issue, and the clear evidence of everything around us of a different reality in a world driven by a climate crisis puts this issue squarely before us. Today, the relationship that must matter equally to ACP states and to our future, is that among ourselves,” she said.

The ACP is negotiating a new arrangement with the European Union, its main development partner, as the existing accord ends next year. At the same time, the ACP will on March 1 welcome Angolan diplomat, Georges Rebelo Chikoti as its new secretary-general, replacing Guyana-born diplomat Patrick Gomes, who leaves office in February next year. Mottley said it is clear that the 45-year-old ACP must evolve from the cooperation contemplated initially in the Georgetown Agreement.

The contemplation back then was for the protection of the export of commodities from former colonies to Europe. Mottley said the ACP must now move to “a relationship among ourselves that sees ourselves not only dwelling, as my good friend the president of Ghana indicated, on the numbers that we have, but on the quality and scholarship of our thought and our commitment to take action.” The Summit is expected to endorse a revised Georgetown Agreement, named after Guyana’s capital, where it was inked, and Mottley said the updated accord “exhorts us to understand each other, or, as I said in the business summit yesterday (Sunday), not simply to know about each other, but to know each other.
“It requires of us to advocate for a multilateral system which contributes to our economic growth and sustainable development, and to strengthen our political identity as a coherent force to advance our organisation’s specific interests internationally.” She said that advancing the ACP’s global engagement as an international organisation represents “a platform of acceleration for our integration into the world economy of goods, services, culture and ideas. **“The digital revolution, which discards geography and the old routes to the metropole and back, is one of the critical devices to help us do so,” Mottley said, noting that in the Caribbean, it is easier for someone to fly from Barbados to London, than to the Bahamas, another Caribbean nation.

“And yesterday we learnt that it is easier to ship from Ghana to London, than from Ghana to Nigeria,” she said, adding that ACP countries must determine how they are going to order their affairs, and make the changes that are in their own deliberate self-interest. “Let us reconsider the limits of our imagination, and allow new structures to naturally rise alongside the old, through our communion with each other. All are welcome in this new dispensation, but we must be prepared to shape it; to nurture it and to protect it.”
The Barbados Prime Minister said that by virtue of the revised Georgetown Agreement, the ACP can forge “an international organisation that is suited to us and our future. “We, the members of the ACP, must function on our own terms, not on the terms set by others,” Mottley said. “Now is the moment where we have a platform to be a common regulatory space, to uphold common minimum standards of human rights, law, business and environmental standards; to be a space of easier mobility of ideas, culture, people, goods, services and capital. These are the main economic weapons of today; not the size and direction only of official assistance and aid.”

She said that the ACP cannot be a force for global good “unless we collectively own that change. “And we all know that lasting and sustainable change; resilient change, cannot be alien, cannot be imposed from outside, cannot reflect standards that we don’t own. Lasting change must come from within. “It must come from our own will to protect and nurture this organisation, because when the difference of opinions come and when the conflict come, as they naturally will, we must be able to have the commitment to do the distance with the recognition that we are always stronger together.”

Mottley urged her colleagues to reflect on the issues she had raised as they deliberate the agenda of the meeting, suggesting also that one of the early actions of the incoming secretary-general should be the urgent establishment of a task force to see how to resolve those issues.

She spoke of the continued impact of climate change on ACP nations. “If North-South relations are to have meaning in the 21st century they must be partly defined by justice of the moment…” The prime minister said there must be a recognition by the global north that the Warsaw mechanism for loss and damage resulting from climate change “cannot simply be a footnote in the documents of the conferences to settle climate change arrangements. It has to be real”.

She said that without action government finances are being stressed to breaking points, even as insurance has become prohibitive for households and businesses in the Caribbean. Mottley recommended that one of the early actions of the incoming secretary-general should be the urgent establishment of a task force “to see how we can resolve these issues … because in many instances scale is required in order for us to be able to turn the corner, particularly with respect to the difficult issue of insurance”.