BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC):
Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley on Monday scolded the international community for imposing a number of problems ranging from climate change to debt repayment on small island developing states (SIDS), as she reiterated her call for a more just and equitable global society in the future.
Addressing the 15th session of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) here, Mottley said one or two generations after these countries became independent, they have found themselves grappling with factors that undermine their very ability to sustain their economies and their societies.
“At the very time when the world needs, literally, support and a constant assurance of fairness and equity, it is receiving the opposite,” she said, informing the newly appointed UNCTAD secretary general, Rebeca Grynspan, that she represents “our last best hope to get it right”.
“I say so, conscious that the political will that is now necessary for you to be successful has to be lined up and marshalled. We hope that this conference, along with the other activities that are due to happen later this year, COP 26 in Glasgow, as well as the WTO ministerial, that it will give us an opportunity to be able to ensure that those issues that regrettably have been on the table for too long, can literally be moved ahead,” Mottley said.
NOT AN EASY TASK
She said she recognises that this would not be an easy task, because those who benefit from the status quo “have no interest in altering the circumstances of our people”.
The UN has said that the four-day conference presents an opportunity for the development community to align the 2030 Agenda on Sustainable Development with the global ‘new normal’ created by the coronavirus pandemic.
It said as a major United Nations conference of the “decade for action” for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, the ministerial conference must address the massive unmet trade, finance, investment and technology needs of developing countries struggling in the face of the COVID-19 challenge.
“The pandemic led to an economic standstill, closed borders and a severe retrenchment in cross-border economic activity – this has effectively paralysed trade as an engine for sustainable prosperity. Compounded by the ‘pre-existing’ lack of trust in multilateralism, the global trading system was woefully unprepared for this global health crisis.
“The most vulnerable countries continue to be the hardest hit by the pandemic, at a time when they were already not doing well. The pandemic and its fallout have exposed existential challenges to the very tenets of globalisation and will have a lasting impact on future efforts by developing countries to gainfully benefit from the global economy,” the UN said ahead of the conference.
Mottley told the conference that she hopes the ‘Bridgetown Covenant’ which is expected to be the outcome document of the deliberations, as well as the Spirit of Speightstown, will “start the marshalling of the political will of the nations of this world to an outcome that will benefit the people of this world and the planet on which we live”.
She said she hopes that the two documents would create that framework over which, for the next three years, “we can work to advance the causes of this great organisation”.
Mottley, who was elected as president of UNCTAD, said there is also a duty to advance the realities of SIDS, who like their counterparts in the Caribbean Community, “continue to raise their voices for too many issues for too long”.