— President Jagdeo
PRESIDENT Bharrat Jagdeo feels the Caribbean Community should mobilise its substantial internal reserves to help it ride out the impact of the global financial crisis on member states.

His call came yesterday during a break in the annual summit he is hosting at the International Conference Centre at Liliendaal, on the lower East Coast Demerara.

“Clearly we need to look at mobilising internal resources too,” he told reporters.“We have significant reserves that are all held outside of the region. We have to make sure that we have a policy to invest those resources.” Mr. Jagdeo noted that this will have to be a sovereign decision, because the resources are held by each sovereign country.

But he argued that if these reserves can be invested in member states, once it is ensured that they are safe and liquid, they can be used to push development forward in the region.

“We have to do things to make our region much more attractive to investments from non-traditional sources,” he said.

Other sources outside of the traditional North America and Europe, he said, are India and China, which have large surpluses, and Arab states with Sovereign Wealth Funds.

The President said Brazil is also looking to expand ties with CARICOM through functional cooperation.

He reiterated that because small countries often find it difficult to command high-level attention in the multilateral financial institutions, CARICOM needs to lead a demarche, probably in Washington and other places to get larger countries “more sympathetic to our views to push our agenda forward.”

This agenda, he said, clearly has to be a reform of these institutions to give greater voice to the developing world and to reform the instruments through which these institutions relate to the developing world, including loan and grant instruments.

Mr. Jagdeo said that since the short-term assistance that many countries need because bilateral sources are not many, “we will have to continue to work through the International Financial Institutions, but to try to trigger the money that was pledged by the G-20 to ensure that some of that flows to our region quickly.”