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Transcript of Remarks delivered by the Honourable Mia Amor Mottley, Q.C., M.P., Prime Minister of Barbados, at the Launch of Volumes 1 & 2 of Caribbean Trade, Integration and Development – Selected Papers and Speeches of Alister McIntyre, at the Errol Barrow Centre for Excellence and Imagination, UWI Cave Hill Campus, Barbados, on Thursday, June 30, 2022.

Distinguished guests, all… but in particular members of the McIntyre family: Lady McIntyre, Arnold, Elga, Ramona. 

I am very happy to be here this evening. And I want to ask you for a minute to reflect on these words because you will appreciate why and why I also invited the guest that I invited today to accompany me, very shortly. 

Those words were delivered on the 8th of December 1975 by Sir Alister McIntyre. They could have as easily, with the exception of the 20% reference in inflation, be delivered in the year 2022 in the region of which we are members. 

I asked Simon Naitram, who is President of the Barbados Economic Society, to be my special guest this evening. Not only because I felt that he would enjoy these proceedings, but because they wanted more than ever to drive home the point that we are in a relay race of development. 

And this relay race means that sometimes the circumstances which we confront may have similarities. I could have easily perhaps gone to the archives down the hill and chosen documents from 1920 that would have spoken about the completion of this country’s efforts in fighting the Spanish flu and what it took for us as a nation to save lives, and then to ask the question whether we were as successful today, comparatively speaking, as we were 102 years ago. 

This relay race of development requires first and foremost that people understand who went before and the leg they ran and how they ran. And this work here provides that context. 

And context is all the more important Professor Moore because more and more, as I read sometimes the newspapers, I wonder whether people have lost perspective and lost context for to hear that $900 million from an IMF program is something that will cripple a country when that constitutes a mere 6.4% of its debt. And at no stage would it garnish more than 4% of the revenues in servicing the debt, tells me that that figure has been used to excite persons without context, because if context was placed, then you would realize that that amount is not only one of the smallest amounts, but that the capacity to service the debt is more than manageable. And that thirdly, if you look at it from the perspective that the debt was used to be able to secure from buses to transport people home – near and far – to garbage trucks, to equipment to deal with roads, to a whole range of things, then you have context and perspective.

I say these things because the second reason that I am inviting Mr. Naitram here is that I believe that I have benefited and others like myself have benefited from being part and parcel of the early witnesses to Caribbean development in the audience, from the audience at the table and learning long before given the opportunity. 

Professor Barriteau would have reflected on the fact that my first public position was Minister of Education and indeed my first Vice-Chancellor as a member of Council, the University of the West Indies Council, Cave Hill, Campus Council University Grants Committee, and ultimately the Strategy Committee that was established by the leadership and vision of Sir Alister was Sir Alister McIntyre. 

I consider myself lucky because that came on the heels of my very first public involvement. My very first attendance at a public function was at the tender age of 15 years old as a student at Queen’s College, having been invited jointly by both Willie de Masse and the then ambassador for the United States, Sally Shelton, to participate in a public policy encounter with the Caribbean Association of Industry and Commerce and Mr. Pat Thompson who was then its leader. 

I don’t forget that moment because at that point in time I understood the passion and the commitment of those around that table at Sam Lord’s Castle as the meeting, where the meeting took place and it put in me a fire in my belly, for want of a better expression, that this experiment called regional integration, could not be allowed to falter simply because our generation was not up to the task. 

It was ironic that my first regional encounter, as a young member of the Barbados Labor Party, with regional – I’m about to say, polycrats instead of technocrats and for those who have read the book, they would appreciate what I mean – was actually with the West Indian Commission, A Time for Action, and I will never forget the meeting that we held under the leadership then of Sir Henry Forde with Sir Shridath Ramphal and Sir Alister McIntyre and other members of that commission. 

I point out these references because it is important more than ever and I regret that whether it is COVID or otherwise, that we are not speaking to young students here because it is important more than ever for the people of this region and of this university to understand that they do not come to this moment in time without a legacy. They come here with a strong legacy. 

And Sir Hillary, I will not be telling tales out of school when I reflect on that first interview you had for the position of Vice-Chancellor, when we spoke then extensively about the strong legacy of development economists that this region has given the world, not the region, the world. 

And I say to Simon, now, that I’ve asked you here today and to speak through you such that in 30 or 40 years from now, you may well be on this platform, and that when you speak from this platform, that you speak of the relay of Caribbean development and that you perhaps unlike Sir Alister and unlike those who went before me and perhaps even me, will not have to speak about the patient growth of regional integration. 

Sir Alister explains it well by reflecting on the fact that it cannot be reversed – three centuries of colonial domination economically – cannot be reversed. He said in seven years. I say in 50 years. But the reality is that that must never be an excuse for complacency. And I fear that as we come around this circle the third time and you may ask why I said the third time, because I start with Jamaica in 1946, it was Sir Hillary? Or ’48? ’48? Montego Bay conference… that this is our third chance. The first chance coincided in a post-war environment when the Bretton Woods Institutions were now being settled upon and little did he know or we know that Sir Alister would have a son who would end up being a divisional director, deputy divisional director of the Western Hemisphere and others who will soon be there carrying on that mantle. 

The second time around was coming out of the burgeoning independence movement into the new international economic order and all of the great problems of the early seventies with the abandonment of the gold standard and the oil crisis and the burgeoning debt that would follow. 

And now us. 

We must not leave this moment as we found it and it is for that reason that my government continues to work aggressively to change the architecture which governs how the world deals with finance and development. 

We are seeing some green shoots with respect to the recognition that people are prepared to accept that GDP per capita cannot be the only basis upon which access to concessional development funds can happen. 

The pace perhaps is not as fast as some would like, but the context is 30 years of battle, 32 years of battle, to be precise. So that you begin to accept that what we have seen happen in the last two years has been nothing short of miraculous, but it has been aided by the historical context once again of COVID and the climate crisis coming together at the same exact moment to be only, now, further propelled by the geopolitical battles that the President of the CDB referred to in his speech just now. 

My friends, we have a duty to carry the battle at this moment in time and we are working with all interested parties: in the United Nations and all interested non-governmental organizations, because we believe, like Sir Alister, that the regional integration movement must propel us but we accept that the context within which it can propel us must also be understood and that is a repurposing of our international financial institutions that simply do not see us sufficiently and have never been structured to be able to deal with us in the ways in which we need it, particularly in facing the triple crises that we face now between the climate crisis, the COVID pandemic and other pandemics, I must add, that will soon follow and of course, the geopolitical consequences on inflation as a result of the war in Ukraine and the impact on fuel and food which is very, very real. 

In Guyana last month – May – today this the 30th of June yes, we met and we believe for the first time there is a serious energy in the propulsion that is necessary for us to attain food security in this region, concomitant with the reality that food security will only be anchored by transport issues being resolved. To that extent therefore, I go to the CARICOM heads of government meeting next week. 

Confident that for us the moment has arrived and hopefully the will is there to match it but the context that we go with is that of the work of those who went before: Sir Arthur Lewis, Sir William Demas, Sir Alister McIntyre recognizing that their work built a foundation upon which now we must further build, while at the same time bringing along our populations because we have knowledge that they didn’t have when they fought these battles and we have a population that is far better educated today than what they would have left and found and left, I should say at the time. 

I trust and pray that this work, this great work, two volumes of almost 600 pages of rich Caribbean thought and writing will help us in this effort not to shy away from our role in the shaping of global financial institutions or in regional development thought but to propel us at a pace that will allow us to see greater progress than they would have seen without the benefit of this work. 

Simon, I say to you that and I’m conscious that others like Kari Levitt have written that this university of which you have been a proud member has raised you up, now, along with others like you to take the battle to the world and to recognize that we have trained you to be as good or better than because you do so with context and experience and perspective and we are facing a world now that is sorely lacking in global moral, strategic leadership. 

Let that leadership come from us at all levels and in all spheres. And let us build on the excellent work that is so immortalized today in these two volumes of a gentleman like Sir Alister McIntyre and many others who, by the sweat of their brow, have literally laid the way for the rest of us now to engage and to take that baton for this leg of the relay. 

I want to salute Arnold yourself, Professor Compton Bourne, who was a critical part of that leadership when I went into the University of the West Indies, as he then was as principal of St Augustine Campus. Andrew, you head of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute here and it is ironic that I speak this evening as President of UNCTAD, given Sir Alister’s role as Deputy Secretary-General of that United Nations institution at an early stage of his career carrying the flag for the Caribbean in a most distinguished manner, as he did. 

My last conversation with Sir Alister, Sir Hilary, was on cricket and I think I called you the weekend after of that conversation. 

I referred to it only to simply say to all others that those who believe that this walk of this life is to be unidimensional have not yet understood the joy of being a Caribbean person.That we can walk and chew and run even and chew is something that is unique to us in many respects, because as you go overseas you realize that many people cannot do what we can do, but because we have been trained to be resilient, we can do these things well. 

Sir Alister’s passion on cricket that weekend and the future of West Indies cricket, will forever stay in my mind and recognize that we as Caribbean citizens come to this moment in time, not just to build an economy, but as we say in Barbados, to build societies. 

It is against that backdrop, therefore, that I end with the words of Lloyd Best once again: “that we pay tribute today to a polycrat and a nation builder”. 

Sir Alister, we salute you. Thank you.