Transcript of remarks delivered by the Honourable Mia Amor Mottley, Q.C., M.P., Prime Minister of Barbados at the Inter-American Development Bank’s 60th Anniversary Celebrations Event
Ronald Reagan Building, Washington, D.C.
September 26, 2019
Let me say that I’m here this evening as an expression of absolute friendship and commitment to the Inter-American Development Bank. This is our fiftieth year as a member of this bank and we joined the bank three years after we became independent.
I have also, at a personal level, had a relationship with the bank as a young Minister of Education from 1994, when President Iglesias did a wonderful job in the leadership of the bank and allowed us to understand the importance of public service and I have never forgotten his entreaty to us that we must lead today always while governing for tomorrow.
Since then, I had the opportunity as a governor of the bank in 2006 and 2007 to work with Luis Alberto and I was completely taken and humbled by his commitment to our country when in the course of the last year in the midst of one of the greatest financial crises and economic crisis that our country has faced, the bank visited us through the president twice in less than 12 months. That is a serious expression of friendship.
We have seen education and coastal defence works changed in our country because of the bank’s commitment to change lives. But we understand that while we have seen much progress there is still further to go. And in this hemisphere, 40 percent of our population are either of Afro descent or indigenous peoples and it must be our continued commitment as the bank approaches its hundredth anniversary, that there is a greater level of social inclusion and reduction of poverty for those who remain on the periphery of the Americas.
In addition to that, we now face the existential issue of our time – climate change – and I need not repeat to you what it has done to many of our countries including regrettably recently to our neighbours in the Bahamas. The sad part of the news is that we continue to be excluded from other forms of concessional financing because we are middle-income countries and the travesty of that is seen when we look at the 50,000 climate refugees that have had to move from Abaco and Grand Bahama into the rest of the Bahamas because they have simply lost all ability to sustain themselves on that island.
We hope that this example being as virulent and as awful as it is, will motivate those who have the ability to make the changes to ensure that people are not denied access to funding because of a rough crafts measurement of GDP, but that we truly look at what is their vulnerability and what is their ability to survive the kinds of threats that we are seeing and you see it as hurricanes but we call the Hurricanes heart attacks and we call the Sargassum Weed and the droughts and lack of water, the diabetes, because it’s insidious. And country by country by country throughout the region, we move from drought to flooding without consequences being seen at the international level as to how they can change how they treat to us in these most basic of problems that are confronting our citizens.
I thank the IDB for giving us access to a tool that has allowed us to be able to map our hazards, map our risk, map our vulnerability and therefore provide greater certainty and greater ability to utilise scarce resources in a meaningful way. That is the kind of benefit that this bank has brought to our people and our ability to confront climate change.
We hope that we can continue to work together across the nations of the world and in our own way we have set ourselves the very modest, the ambitious target, but as a small country we understand its modest contribution to climate change; that by 2030 we should be a fossil fuel-free nation. That we shall also seek, next year, to plant more than a million trees on one hundred and sixty-six square miles and that we should seek to focus our infrastructural projects to those which are transformational rather than to have many doing many little things in our own case, we have chosen the transformational project of roofs to reefs because our roofs are exposed at a time when codes were not strong enough to guarantee their stability and our reefs continue to be destroyed because of global warming and acidification.
We therefore hope that we work with the bank to better refine how we become resilient. I leave you with one or two key points. One: we need to look at the inclusion of natural disaster clauses in our financial instruments. Because of the financial crisis that by way this has gone through in the last year, we restructure our debt and we insisted in the restructuring of our debt that we include natural disaster clauses because we all know that in the midst of a strong climatic event there will probably be a default. It is better for us to plan how we will treat to those events with certainty than to leave ourselves exposed to the vagaries of crude default so that in our case we have literally agreed that we should suspend our debt for principal payments for two years and capitalize our interests at the back end of the instruments for another two years. That gives us the ability to look at how best we can not only repair public infrastructure that has been damaged but also to have it blended such that we can meet the needs of the underinsured and the uninsured.
And this brings us to the last point of the cost of insurance. You know and I know that that costs will soon become extremely prohibitive for our people in the region. There are already some businesses there are spending as much as 20 percent of their expenditure on insurance premia. We believe that we have to do something about it. A year ago in this city, we met at the IMF with the World Bank and the IDB and started the discussion. But we have not yet concluded it. For us, there’s a sense of urgency. We have 69 days left in this hurricane season and we are nine months from the start of the next hurricane season. That drives for us, therefore, the urgency of being able to deal with this.
We know that the insurance premia in the northern Caribbean will significantly rise because of the claims that will flow from Dorian. But we have to determine how we can continue to afford and is our pool large enough or should we not be spreading the pool to ensure the diversification of risk by being able to include countries from Central America, the entire Caribbean region irrespective of language, the Gulf states of the United States of America who are exposed, the eastern seaboard states were exposed, and we now see with great clarity the eastern provinces of Canada were exposed. And when we add to that the coastal states of Latin America who may not be exposed to hurricanes but who are exposed nevertheless to floods, then we begin to see a pool.
What are the regulatory barriers that have to be removed to bring about that? Because at some point if people can’t afford insurance, the reinsurers will not get any business. And if the reinsurers don’t get any business there is a lose-lose proposition on the table. It is not beyond our capacity to solve this issue in the same way that we believe it is not beyond human ingenuity to solve the problem and to halt and reverse climate change.
Mr President, I am sorry that I have to leave you. I am sorry that your anniversary coincides with UNGA, but I knew that I could not allow this occasion to pass without bringing the wishes of the people of Barbados for the continued prosperity of the Inter-American Development Bank, for your continued interventions to begin to relieve poverty, build social inclusion and build prosperity for the people of the Americas. Your term as president will be remembered particularly by the people of Barbados for your interventions at a time when we needed it most. A friend indeed you have been. I bless you and I ask you and the others in this bank to continue to work in the cause of all people of the Americas.
Thank you very much.