At CARICOM Summit in Dominica…
HEADS meeting in Dominica for the 21st Inter-Sessional meeting of CARICOM (Caribbean Community) Heads of Government opened talks Thursday by pleading the cause of highly-indebted regional economies.
Their appeals were directed to specially-invited guests, the presidents of the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), Messrs Robert Zoellick and Luis Alberto Moreno respectively, and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Mr. Dominique Strauss-Khan.
During the course of their discussions, CARICOM leaders sought to forge strategic alliances to combat the two most critical issues affecting the Region, namely the debt situation of member states and climate change.
At a press conference in Dominica ahead of the caucus, Guyana’s President Bharrat Jagdeo said the debt issue is a critical factor in the future growth strategy of the Region.
“The debt burden, unless we address that, there is no viable medium-term growth strategy for the region,” he told reporters.
Reflecting on the past performances of the economies at reference, President Jagdeo said the problem of debt was a common thread in many of the middle-income countries of the Caribbean which became progressively worse as these countries began losing preferential markets.
“There is no multilateral initiative at this point in time to get debt relief or debt restructuring to middle-income countries, because we are grouped with larger middle-income countries in the world (such as Mexico, Brazil and Argentina), and there is this fear that if they give it to us, then there will be the contagion, the moral hazard,” President Jagdeo said, adding that it is for this very reason efforts are being made to craft a special provision in the international financial institutions’ structure for debt relief to small, vulnerable, middle-income countries, aside from the larger middle-income countries.
“We can do so on the basis of several vulnerabilities; we have made that case over and over again,” President Jagdeo said.
Reference was also made to the ‘unfair characterization’ of the Region whereby jurisdictions in the developed world that support financial services often do less than us, but are often not faced with the brunt of penalties as we do.
“We (the Caribbean) are lectured; we find ourselves on a ‘grey list’, and we are at the brunt of penalties because people either don’t know what we are doing to clean up and make transparent our financial sector, or they don’t want to do it for competition purposes,” the President said.All CARICOM Heads of Government, with the exception of Suriname, Belize and St Vincent and the Grenadines were present at the two-day meeting, along with representatives of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, the Organisation of American States (OAS), and the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA).
(GINA)