St Vincent’s Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves on Friday urged the 33-member CELAC bloc to set up a permanent headquarters for the body to achieve its goals.
Gonsalves, the departing president of CELAC, stated that the upcoming year should be dedicated to establishing a permanent and flexible secretariat for the integration movement.
Gonsalves emphasised the need for a permanent CELAC secretariat to effectively handle its significant responsibilities in the current complex global landscape, highlighting the principle that form should align with function, as seen in biology.
“There are functions to be performed by CELAC that cannot adequately be performed with the current structure. I am calling for us to give serious and urgent consideration to a permanent and nimble secretariat for CELAC to carry out his requisite functions,” Gonsalves stated.
“Our quest for sustainable development and inclusive societies and our geographical closeness have all conspired to predispose us towards creating CELAC. The requisite glue of solidarity, purpose, and action in our contemporary times in pursuit of peace, justice, prosperity, and security for all. Based on the popular will that induced us to establish this celebrated regional integration mechanism, CELAC is a community of sovereign states.”
Gonsalves said the bloc is gathering in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines for the eighth summit at a time of extraordinary global challenges of great complexity, awash with multiple contradictions. These impact significantly on our America and specifically on our people’s lives, living, and production.
“These externally sourced encumbrances and burdens, which restrict or constrain the scope of action of our people, are made more complicated by homegrown weaknesses, limitations, confusions, and conflicts. Despite our strengths and possibilities, inclusive of those resident in the genius of our peoples, even with our own burdensome travails and setbacks, we have advanced commendably,” he said.
Gonsalves said CELAC has a roadmap for confronting meaningfully the challenges and encumbrances, burdens, weaknesses, and limitations, and from our inherited and existing conditions, the bloc has set forth accordingly a package of policies and programmes to advance our people’s interests.
“Our draft Declaration of Kingstown, of nearly 100 paragraphs, which I expect to be adopted unanimously today, contains the necessary and desirable pathway in the 12 headings.”
Gonsalves highlighted that significant projects were carried out during his tenure as president of CELAC.
“ The elaboration of the health sufficiency plan, the proposal for the establishment of the Latin American and Caribbean centre for the development of science, the platform for food security, the push for enhanced air and sea transport, technology, and innovation, the joint promotion of an environment for open, secure, stable, accessible, and peaceful information and communications technologies,” Gonsalves noted.
