Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, Monday reiterated a call for the international community to re-think its lending policies toward small island developing states (SIDS) like those in the Caribbean, noting that some regional countries are faced with debt burdens because of having to deal with the impact of climate change.
“We also need to recognize that having arbitrary numbers for debt sustainability in the context of small island developing states does not work,” Mottley said as she addressed the Caribbean launch of the United Nations Early Warning for All (EW4ALL) initiative.
She said Barbados, for example, has been doing coastal preparations since the 1980s and “part of our debt is in fact to prevent the worse to our coastal environment.
“For every dollar of prevention, you save seven dollars in recovery in expenditure. We know that. But when you are then told your debt to GDP (gross domestic product) does not admit of you spending enough money to renew a school infrastructure that that is more than …200 years, 250 years in some instances, how then do you provide the support systems for people to be re-located, both pre and in many instances post disaster”.
Mottley said Caribbean countries do not have the capacity “genuinely to withstand serious hurricanes in this region that are category three and upwards,” adding “and if the international community does not understand that, then they do not understand our circumstances.”
The Barbados prime minister said when the countries understand the cause of the situation “it is not our behavior or our values or our attitudes then we have a crisis.
“The problem is that the crisis is not unique to us. We are just the canaries and whatever we thought before, 2022 put paid I suspect, to many people’s doubts”.
She said the Jamaican-band Third World sang a tune titled “96 Degrees in the shade” but London and Europe “told us differently last year when108 and 110 degrees became the standard.
“In the winter, the notion that a state in the United States could be 30 degrees from the temperature of Mars is a sci-fi movie or book,” she said, noting that as temperatures begin to plunge to “we know we are in dangerous territory.
Mottley praised UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres for his “continued courage and compassion, his values and his global moral strategic leadership, but I ask all of us…to recognize that it is in doing these practical things, which yes do require funding…we are nothing if we want to walk this journey alone”.
CMC/
