UNITED NATIONS (CMC) – St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves on Friday said while small island developing states (SIDS) have made incremental advances, they have nonetheless been in a situation akin to going up a down escalator.
Addressing the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Gonsalves said that as a result, SIDS have found themselves in a situation in which the down escalator is moving at a faster pace than the upward baby steps.
“Frequently, it appears as though much of the powerful would wish that SIDS did not exist. But here we are stubborn as the heavens; we are not going anywhere despite our massive vulnerabilities. Our people have a permanence in this world even if some of our lands wash away; we have a voice, and we will continue to use it,” he said.
Gonsalves said despite a quarter century of analysis, advocacy, and prescriptions set forth by the leaders of SIDS and international institutions charged with advancing the interest of SIDS, “our travails are enduring in a global community largely disinterested in our well-being and that of small states generally.
“We in SIDS remain unequally yoked in a global community motivated by the baser instincts of the untrammelled power of money, ideology, guns, lethal weaponry, territorial and global dominance.”
Gonsalves said that SIDS demands, as of right, special support from the international community to address the unique social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities of SIDS efficaciously in the interest of the nearly 70 million people who permanently occupy the seascape and landscape of SID.
He said small island exceptionalism ought to be a category embedded formally in international law and accorded the most favourable treatment.
“Rather than securing a most favourable treatment, the SIDS are required to fight to maintain even the special considerations which Providence or serendipity has bestowed upon them,” Gonsalves said, noting that a case in point is the attempt, currently, by the International Development Association (IDA) to pit the most vulnerable, the SIDS, against the poorest countries in its quest to tighten the terms under which qualifying SIDS, of a particular income level, such as St. Vincent and the Grenadines, obtain soft-loans through the World Bank–IDA nexus.”
Gonsalves said that in any event, why is the World Bank persisting with the “single, anachronistic and ill-designed metric of average per capita income in respect of vulnerable SIDS” in the age of the Anthropocene, as against a more comprehensive and sensible measure of a multi-dimensional vulnerability index.
He said that the unvarnished truth is that the developed countries have not kept their promises to the SIDS, except the most marginal ones.
“Importantly, the countries of the developed world, the major historical and contemporary emitters of greenhouse gases, have failed and/or refused to keep their solemn commitments of restricting the global temperature at below 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels.
“Unless there are drastic alterations in the patterns of consumption, production, life, and living in developed and large emerging economies, our planet is inexorably on a path to a proverbial hell in a hand-basket.”
Gonsalves said that in the process, countries of an island or seaboard civilisation are likely to be inundated by raging seas and enveloped in searing heat.
He said regarding the financing of climate change, the developed countries, which have the means and the major historic responsibility to contain this existential threat, “have been parsimonious and less than responsible, in practice.
“Even today, the cynicism and double-speak of several major developed countries is breathtaking in response to the quest of most of the global community to transform the international financial institutions as fit-for-purpose in today’s world, and for responsible, reasonable alterations in the actual modalities of climate change financing.”
Gonsalves said high representatives of most of these developed countries pay lip service, in general, to the innovative Bridgetown three proposals calling for urgent and decisive action to reform the international financial architecture (IFA) and endorsed by CARICOM “only to nit-pick and delay, in the particular, on the essentials.
“Brazenly, when these developed countries make a marginal concession, they trumpet it as a major advance to send the proverbial fool a little further,” Gonsalves said, adding that the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS (ABAS), adopted earlier this year, encompasses an action-oriented framework for the way forward.
He said the recently adopted “Pact for the Future” by the UNGA provides a wider and promising buttress.
Gonsalves said that in the advocacy for the 39 SIDS, it also embraces the cause of the Least Developed Countries and the Landlocked Developing Countries in the UN System. He said growing material dissatisfaction grips increasingly large numbers of people in both the metropoles and the hinterlands in this highly interconnected world.
“Noticeably, the ceremony of innocence is drowned, things are falling apart, the centres cannot hold, and the cascading effects are ripping the world asunder; the best of all lack conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”
In his address, Gonsalves said no country in this hemisphere can reasonably be considered a security or other threat to the United States.
“Yet, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and other Caribbean countries have been damaged collaterally, and directly, in significant material ways, by the weaponising of the financial system and the unjust, unilateral, coercive sanctions against Venezuela and Cuba, which are a breach of international law.
“I am pleading with our friends for an amicable reset of these troubled relations in the interest of peace, mutual respect, justice, and prosperity. The international community continues, overwhelmingly and rightly, to demand the end of the unilateral sanctions, the embargos, and unfair declarations about state sponsorship of terrorism, and more, made against Cuba.”
Gonsalves told the UNGA that on July 1, Hurricane Beryl, a category four hurricane, battered St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Grenada, and Jamaica.
He said since the dawn of the 21st century, this is the 12th significant natural disaster to have struck my country, excluding the volcanic eruptions of 2021.
“Hurricane Beryl has adversely affected one-fifth of our population and has caused economic damage amounting to one-third of our country’s gross domestic product (GDP). The relief, recovery, and reconstruction processes are underway.
“On behalf of the government and people of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, I thank all countries and organisations, including the United Nations, that have come to our aid in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane.
“Unfortunately, for the recovery and rebuilding processes, we are essentially on our own; we have had to seek significant loans to rebuild our physical infrastructure and 5,000 houses, to provide income support for affected persons, and to mobilise production support for the agricultural, fishing, and tourism industries.”
Prime Minister Gonsalves said he is appealing to the international community “to assist us not with further burdensome loans, but with requisite grants.
“The recovery and reconstruction after every natural disaster increase sharply our debt burden; countries like St. Vincent and the Grenadines have contributed little or nothing to global warming and man-made climate change, yet we suffer largely alone on the frontlines. This cannot be fair; it cannot be just. Do we have to choose death or debt?”
The St. Vincent and the Grenadines prime minister also used the occasion to reiterate the region’s position regarding reparation from Europe for the slave trade.
“The Caribbean Community, the African Union, the Community of States of Latin America and the Caribbean, their diasporas and all fair-minded persons globally have been insisting that the European nations responsible for native genocide and the enslavement of African bodies pay reparations for the consequential legacy of underdevelopment.
“This issue of transformative reparatory justice will not go away until it is addressed appropriately. [In this context, too, St. Vincent and the Grenadines supports the initiative of Colombia, Brazil and South Africa for a UNGA Resolution towards a second International Decade for People of African Descent with Dignity and Transformative Reparations,” Gonsalves added.