Remarks by The Honourable Mia Amor Mottley Q.C., M.P., Prime Minister of Barbados, on behalf of CARIFORUM, at the 9th Summit of the Heads of State and Government of the ACP Group
Nairobi, Kenya
9 December 2019
Thank you very much, your excellency, President Kenyatta, all distinguished heads of government, heads of state, heads of delegation, distinguished members all, let me this morning, first of all, President Kenyatta thank you for the kind welcome and gracious hospitality.
The warm expression of “Karibu” embraces us wherever we go, and I should say “Asante!”
At the outset, also let me thank Dr. Gomes for his stewardship of this organisation, and at the same time to welcome the incoming Secretary-General, Mr Georges Rebel’s Pinto Chikoti, of the Republic of Angola and to congratulate him on his selection as the next Secretary-General.
But as I stand here colleagues, I ask the question: Does the ACP at this point of our destiny stand a fast track to the future or is it a relic of the past?
Institutional arrangements are hard to change, and very often it takes a crisis of legitimacy: a moment of illegitimacy. The G7 became the G20 not because of a planned democratic evolution in the affairs of global governance, but rather because the global financial crisis required a global response. It became immediately obvious that the G7 was totally inadequate to the task.
In the 21st century, the old institutional configurations underlying the ACP-EU relationship, as defined by Lomé, I suggest, are irrelevant to the present and to the future. Our rapid economic growth and the looming climate crisis demand a reorientation of the constellation of our relations. The post-Cotonou negotiations have forced the issue, and the clear evidence of everything around us of a different reality in a world driven by a climate crisis puts this issue squarely before us.
Today, the relationship that must matter equally to ACP states and to our future, is that among ourselves.
It is clear that we must evolve from the cooperation contemplated initially in the Georgetown Agreement, for the protection of the export of commodities from former colonies to Europe, to a relationship among ourselves that sees ourselves not only dwelling, as I my good friend the president of Ghana indicated, on the numbers that we have, but on the quality and scholarship of our thought and our commitment to take action.
The revived Georgetown Agreement before us for endorsement, exhorts us to understand each other, or as I said in the business summit yesterday, not simply to know about each other, but to know each other.
It requires of us to advocate for a multilateral system which contributes to our economic growth and sustainable development; and to strengthen our political identity as a coherent force to advance our organization’s specific interests internationally.
Advancing our global engagement as an international organization represents a platform of acceleration for our integration into the world economy of goods, services, culture and ideas. The digital revolution, which discards geography, and the old routes to the metropole and back, is one of the critical devices to help us do so.
In the Caribbean, it is easier for someone in Barbados to travel to London than to reach the Bahamas, and yesterday we learnt that it is easier to shift from Ghana to London, that from Ghana to Nigeria. This is a moment therefore in which we have to determine, how we are going to order our affairs and to make the changes that are in our own deliberate self-interest. Let us reconsider the limits of our imagination and allow new structures to naturally rise alongside the old through our communion with each other. All are welcome in this new dispensation, but we must be prepared to shape it, to nurture it and to protect it.
By virtue of the revised Georgetown Agreement, we can forge an international organization that is suited to us and our future. We the members of the ACP must function on our own terms, not on the terms set by others.
Now is the moment where we have a platform to be a common regulatory space, to uphold common minimum standards of human rights, law, business and environmental standards; to be a space of easier mobility of ideas, culture, people, goods, services and capital. These are the main economic weapons of today, not the size and direction only of official assistance and aid.
The ACP cannot be a force for global good unless we collectively own that change. And we all know that lasting and sustainable change, resilient change, cannot be alien, cannot be imposed from outside, cannot reflect standards that we don’t own. Lasting change must come from within.
It must come from our own will to protect and nurture this organisation, because when the difference of opinions come and when the conflict comes, as they naturally will, we must be able to have the commitment to go the distance with the recognition that we are always stronger together.
So, my friends, I ask us, therefore, to reflect on these things as we confront many of the issues today. The most important for us from our part of the world, and I suspect even here now in Africa and the Pacific, is the climate crisis. In Kenya, your experience with flooding in recent days is just a reinforcement of the existential threat that we all face.
Today, almost all of our countries are reeling under the impact and effect of the climate crisis. If North-South relations are to have meaning in the 21st century they must be partly defined by justice, of the moment and by the recognition that the Warsaw mechanism for loss and damage cannot simply be a footnote in the documents of the conferences to settle climate change arrangements. It has to be real.
We in the region know that we are not the ones who started this but we are on the front lines of the battle and are receiving the damaging consequences of it. The notion of climate refugees is now regrettably part and parcel of our lexicon throughout African, Caribbean and Pacific countries. It’s here, it’s now, it’s not forecasted, it’s not predicted. Lives are being lost, livelihoods are being destroyed — Dominica, Barbuda and in recent times the Commonwealth of the Bahamas in the Caribbean.
Without action, government finances are being stressed to breaking points. Equally, the cost of insurance has become prohibitive for households and businesses in our part of the world, and we ask: Where shall our economies go, given that most security and contracts require the procurement of insurance on the part of businesses if they are to participate fully in a globally integrated economy? These are the real issues our people are facing on a daily basis, and we would do well to confront them and to advocate their resolution as a matter of urgency.
Now is the day.
I recommend that one of the early actions of the incoming Secretary-General should be the urgent establishment of a task force to see how we can resolve these issues, because in many instances scale is required in order for us to be able to turn the corner, particularly with respect to the difficult issue of insurance.
I also ask us to consider the vexing issue for us, namely the vulnerability index. Thirty years ago, we the small states of the world determined that the best mechanism for access and determining access to official assistance or concessional loans ought to be the establishment of a vulnerability index, rather than the raw and crude mechanism of per capita income and Gross Domestic Product.
As a result of the failure to understand and appreciate the inherent vulnerability, we agreed in Cotonou to an arrangement that allowed free trade fully for only those countries that were HIPC (heavily indebted poor countries), a determination made once again on per capita income and GDP. We believe that the myopia reflected in that decision is seen by the extent to which our countries, those middle-income countries like the Bahamas, are facing serious restructuring and reconstruction as a result of the hurricanes that have literally brought them to their knees.
For decades, we have said in Barbados, that in spite our high level of development, if a hurricane hits us tomorrow, we will move from dealing with qualitative issues in education to access to basic school places because of the destruction that it will be wrought on our society. It is against this background therefore that I ask us to recognize that we cannot continue the process of development as contemplated in the post-Independence era, with the vulnerability that we have in a climate crisis world, without appreciating that there needs to be special mechanisms for financing resilience and adaptation.
And finally, I ask us equally to recognize that as a grouping, the ACP ought to be the community that brings a human face to handle the fractious issue of migration in today’s world. We have allowed the movement of capital, but we seem not to like each other enough to allow the movement of people.
This requires a human and humane approach and I ask that we consider as we go forward, Mr. President, that it is critical that we can be that defining difference in history to agree to a compact that establishes a social floor below which none of our citizens should fall.
For in so doing, the Xenophobic and racist aspects of migration will evaporate, because we will begin to see people as people adding value rather then people sucking and draining from the whole. This is a moral obligation that we the citizens of ACP nations are best placed to bring to the rest of the world because of our own history and experiences.
So, my friends, the choice is clear: Will the ACP be a fast track to our future or will it be a relic of the past? I suggest to you that we the states of the Caribbean region, CARIFORUM, believe that we have a moral duty to make the ACP the fast track to our future and to bring to global discussions a level of humanity and realism that is required by our citizens in this 21st Century.
I am obliged to you.