May 28, 2024
Excellencies. It’s with a sense of gratitude and pride that we and our Caribbean people that we gather here in Antigua and Barbuda today to take up the baton to host this fourth International Conference on Small Island Developing States. Thirty years ago it was actually almost to the day that we met in Barbados and we hosted the first International Conference of Small Island Developing States which birthed the global SIDS agenda, then named the Barbados Program of Action. No longer in its infancy, but indeed a mature instrument today, our current agenda recognizes the urgency and the necessity of resilient prosperity for SIDS.
Barbados therefore looks forward to the adoption of the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for Small Island Developing States, commonly known and told as ABAS, a renewed declaration for resilient prosperity. My friends, the frequency and scale of natural disasters causing human suffering, loss or compromised livelihoods, irreparable physical damage and high economic costs are now regrettably a horrifying global reality. The chasm between United Nations Member States’ spoken commitment and finance implementation condemns us and contradicts our profession of seriousness and sincerity.
Our people will wonder what are we really doing when they look at this season of superlatives that is causing the untold damage that it is. The Bridgetown Initiative, the Paris Pact for People and Planet, the SDG stimulus, along with other initiatives, provide us with a roadmap, yes, on how the international community can support the correction of the economic balance sheet of SIDS, but we must build a more responsive, fairer and more inclusive global financial system and we must do so with pace and with scope. Speed and scope are exactly what is missing from our agenda, not that we haven’t made progress, but insufficient progress.
The Bridgetown Initiative, version 3.0, which we launched today for consultation later today, urges consideration of a global solidarity levy for people, for planet, and also allows us to be able to reflect on where these levies can come with the least damage and the least burden on people, whether it is on fossil fuels, windfall profits, whether it is on international financial transactions or emissions from shipping and aviation that are intended all to be able to allow us to do the financing of global public goods, first and foremost climate, but beyond climate. Another contributor would have to be in a new framework, a global compact with philanthropy, recognizing that they get to spend money on what they want, but we now need them to spend money on what the world needs as well. This will allow us to be able to have adequate financing for climate, but other global public goods that are critical because we are not a one issue people.
Recognizing these priorities for small island developing states, conscious that when compared with mitigation, there is truly inadequate financing available for adaptation, and we must not allow the establishment of the loss and damage fund to take our eyes away from the critical financing needed for adaptation. We need to be able to address the issue of resilience and prosperity, but financing is not the destination. It is simply the mechanism by which we become capable of executing projects that will allow us to become resilient and ultimately prosperous.
Barbados, therefore, will reflect on a few issues. We are on the verge of establishing a blue-green bank with an initial capitalization that has been promised of 77 million U.S. and hopefully will increase. We also just hosted the first global supply chain conference to address these most critical issues that will allow us to be able to attain resilience.
At that same conference, with the Director General of UNIDO, Mr. Muller, he and I were able to launch the Barbados-based Global SIDS Hub Office for Sustainable Development. This new UNIDO Barbados SIDS Hub will serve SIDS worldwide by promoting SIDS-SIDS cooperation, delivering technical support to increase SIDS resilience, facilitate economic diversification, and indeed ultimately promote investment in SIDS. The Hub’s office will be blue-green economy, digital and green solutions, and it will seek to leapfrog to innovative technologies.
I should say to you, though, that investment being critical means that we have to get over the issue of adaptation because without adaptation, our countries are likely to become uninsurable, and if we are uninsurable, we are likely to become uncompetitive and uninvestable. These are the realities of what we face, and hence we cannot move only singularly to create instruments without addressing the fundamental need for adaptation financing. Similarly, the Climate Vulnerable Forum, or the V20, works to strengthen economic and financial resources to the climate crisis and leads to high-level policy dialogue to drive action on the climate crisis and promotes climate-resilient and low-emission development.
Currently, there are 68 countries in the V20 Forum. Barbados is pleased very shortly to assume chairmanship of that body from Ghana, and I’d like to thank the President of Ghana and the Minister of Finance for the excellent manner in which they have led that institution and sought to make it more relevant to our countries as we go forward. For the very same countries that are members of the V20 now, many of them are facing liquidity and solvency crises as we go forward, and hence the importance of addressing issues from debt sustainability and a new deal for finance for all climate countries, so that together, if we can act, we can amplify the voices of the most vulnerable and increase and accelerate the resources that must be directed towards our people.
My friends, the experience of the small island developing states during the COVID-19 pandemic clearly demonstrated that SIDS and other developing countries must also focus on pharmaceutical manufacturing. To that end, Barbados has started an initiative with Rwanda, recognizing that the link between climate and health makes us all the more vulnerable because of the increased likelihood of new pathogens that will affect human lives and indeed all forms of biodiversity. Steps to ensure, therefore, that countries are not on the wrong side of the technology divide are critical if we are to face all of the consequences with respect to the climate crisis that we confront as small island developing states.
In shock-proofing our societies and economies, we must collectively look to all of those areas of highest vulnerability. In that regard, the current SIDS practice of international reviews every five to ten years, I say simply, is inadequate. I call for a biennial assembly of SIDS heads at this stage, along with the establishment of a governance structure to oversee the implementation of the ABAS and all following outcome texts.
And this is critical, but it must also command the highest attention of the other countries of the world because if the representation of the larger countries who have capacity is at too low a level, then we shall remain unequally yoked in our ability to be able to see progress on the policy agenda. It was the noted Barbadian writer, many of you I hope know, George Lamming, and if you don’t, I suggest that you read his works, but he said to us and cautioned us that the architecture of our future is not finished. I want to repeat myself, the architecture of our future is not finished.
The task of this generation of leaders in small island developing states, and indeed our citizens, is to complete the work that we started in 1994, 30 years ago in Barbados, where we felt that there needed to be a special framework for small island developing states. I’m truly grateful that just now the United Nations Secretary General, in our last session, reflected on the need for simplicity with respect to many of the things that affect small island developing states, whether it is special and differential treatment in the World Trade Organization, or whether it is simplified mechanisms for dealing with financial restructuring and making available longer and cheaper financing available for our people. You cannot treat a country that is on the verge of sinking with less than 200,000 people in the same way that you treat a country that has 30 million people with great resources.
A climatic event for us is likely to be a whole of country event, and therefore likely to go at the core of our sovereignty and our capacity to survive. The notion that we can continue to talk and talk and talk without establishing the framework for what will create a platform for hope is what is missing. It is geopolitics and national politics that is blocking progress in this world.
And until we recognize that to fight the climate, we need all countries, irrespective of their geopolitics, irrespective of their national politics, we will be at risk of losing, regrettably, too many people whose lives should not be lost at the foot of this climate crisis. I hope that we can leave Antigua with a spirit of hope, recognizing that we may not get everything that we want, but that spirit of hope is necessary to keep us buoyant and to keep the fight up, for progress has been made, just not with sufficient speed and scope. Let us now press gas.
Thank you.
