On Wednesday 13 July, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves stated that the Caribbean region, from a colonial or amended colonial economy, has been seeking to create a multifaceted, multilateral, and globally competitive economy.
Gonsalves who was speaking at Concordia Summit 2022, said the defining features of the colonial or the amended colonial economy included reliance on an unlimited supply of unskilled and cheap labour and subsidies at home and preferential markets overseas.
Gonsalves said the region must now shift from that for all kinds of objective reasons, including the global economy. He said the diversification has to be competitive and modern in which there’s a reliance on unlimited supplies of skilled, educated labour priced at a level in the chain of the international division of labour and with no reliance on any external market preferences and with very limited subsidies at home unless it’s a strategic industry.
However, the St Vincent Prime Minister says for the Caribbean to achieve strategically this paradigm shift, we have to be in a world where there is fairness.
“You cut out the preferences for bananas and sugar in the marketplace. And you say go into financial services and as soon as you go into financial services, the Europeans say it’s a harmful tax regime. Never mind that London was doing this thing. It’s only with the Ukraine war that we hear about London Grad, where a whole set of the oligarchs are and what they do is they take one or two of them, take their yacht here and there. But they have not addressed the real problem in the system in Delaware and Colorado and all the rest of it”.
Gonsalves says the system is not fair. For instance, he says countries like the Bahamas and Barbados which have a high level of human development and a high per capita G. D. P, they are being locked out from any concessionary financing.
“What they need to do for middle-income countries is that we need to have now is what is called in the literature now an M. V.I. You have to have a many-sided multi vulnerability index so that you use different criteria for concessional financing. When you look at the debt profile and you look at the amount of money we have to spend for instance on mitigation and adaptation in relation to the existentialist of climate change, we don’t contribute anything to this or hardly anything but yet we’re on the front line and then you tell me from the I. M. F, hey, your debt to GDP is out of whack with some sort of standards”.
Gonsalves stated that the paradigm shift which Caribbean nations are seeking to do is being done against the backdrop of a legacy of underdevelopment and in addressing that legacy of underdevelopment, on the agenda must be reparations for native genocide and the enslavement of African bodies.
“We need to have a sensible, objective multilateral conversation on these issues and these are 21st-century issues. There are countries which want to keep us still addressing 20th Century Contradictions and 20th-century problems. We have serious 21st-century problems and in the 3rd decade Of the 21st century, we have to address these in an objective manner, the old categories of left and right are gone out of the door and we have to watch objectively”.
“Unfortunately, men’s minds are still weighed down by the ghosts from the past and we use them to govern the present and they become present ghosts. We have to stop that but yet their political forces which simply feed on these ghosts which are debilitating. And I’ve come all the way for this forum to give this message that we have to allow small island developing states the space within the global system two not just survive, but to thrive”.
Gonsalves said he is not asking for any special privileges, just for the system to deliver on what was agreed upon.
“I’m just asking for fairness and reasonableness to give my people a chance to grow and to develop sustainably in accordance with the 17 Sustainable Development Goals, which we agreed upon In 2015 at the United Nations. And goal number 17 says that we must build efficacious partnerships, and I don’t think it is unreasonable to insist that all of us signed onto that, we must follow through in practical terms, simple, straightforward”, Gonsalves said.
