By: Kimberly Ramkhalawan
September 27, 2022
While many nations often come up to the United Nations’ General Assembly to come and complain, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley has once again put forward her standing up for smaller states, like hers, for the change she desires to see that would in effect make all nations equal and on a level playing field.
Her passionate speech comes off the heels where she addressed the US Congress on the disparity Caribbean and Developing states have for so long faced when it came to correspondence banking.
To this however, Mottley held no words back before the 77th General Assembly when she spoke out against the long-standing financial institutions that have ran this world. She said the time had come “for a review of the settlement of the Bretton Woods institutions”, an agreement that came about in 1944 that sought to help rebuild large nations that were affected by World War I, which were the then independent states of the world. But Mottley reminded her audience of the UN’ president, that these institutions “no longer serve the purpose in the 21st century that they served in the 20th century”. She questioned whether the time has come for our voices to act collectively through the board of directors of the respective institutions. Bretton Woods came to serve as the international bank for reconstruction and development, to which Mottley reminded her audience, “was really what the World Bank is”. She said “maybe if we refer to that continuously, we would remind ourselves that the purpose of reconstruction and development must be appropriate to the century in which we live. agreement in 1944, including the IMF and what became the World Bank Group”.
And while she added that “the best place to deal with Global goods is at the World Bank Group, if multinational companies have contributed to the global public risk, or benefited from the solutions from global public goods, then they ought to contribute to their resolutions through a percentage of their profits funding the needs of countries, whether it be in the issue of climate, stability and resilience and adaptation, whether it is toward the protection of biodiversity in our land and in our waters, whether it is protection of public health against the next pandemic”.
Currently other basic necessities she said included “Believe it or not, the right to a bank account, because countries around the world are being denied the right to access correspondence banking and leaving their citizens and economies to function as financial pariahs in a world that is supposed to be interdependent for the movement of capital”.
In one breath, while she thanked the current institution, the IMF, of which Barbados has been involved with in recent years, and now with the addition of bonds taken out to fund its resilience against climate change, Mottley shared that “those who come to the bank for reconstruction and development do not simply commend it, for countries following a disaster, but let us do it for countries before the disaster, for every dollar spent, as they have researched, saves seven dollars in avoided expenditure, not to mention the lives that are saved. We don’t want to only pay the undertaker, we want to save lives”.
She went on to put forward the question to the IMF, “to reflect on a fact that that resilience and sustainability trust might need to be delinked from quotas if it is to be effective”. The Barbados Prime Minister said while she was “conscious of more countries seeding that fund with capital and more countries agreeing to perhaps allow their special drawing rights to be used there”. She says instead these countries should be allowed to use those special drawing rights and “allow multilateral banks to significantly increase the money that is available to countries particularly at this time as we are on the verge of a debt crisis”. Mottley highlighted that there were “more than 45 countries are facing the heat at the moment because of the increased cost of capital as a result of the monetary policies that are being put in place to fight the virulent cancer of inflation.
Prodding further, Mottley asked “to reach a global compact, that financing development not be short term financing, but be atleast thirty-year money”. She reminded her audience that “the world recognized that when it allowed Britain to be able to participate in the refinancing of its World War bonds which were only paid off eight years ago, one hundred years after World War I started, or when it allowed Germany to cap its debt service at the equivalent of five percent of its exports, conscious that the cataclysmic experience of war, would not have allowed them to finance reconstruction while repaying debts incurred for war”.
She remarked, “these have not been the subject of idle thoughts or arbitrary comments on our part, we had the good fortune to collect in Barbados, a large number of persons from civil societies and academia, at the beginning of July end of August”. To this she said resulted in what her team has come to call the ‘Bridgetown Agenda’, one that speaks to the reform of the Brentwoods Architecture , one which she says they “have asked and will ask countries and people to join it because we believe that unless we take responsibility for ourselves, unless we accept we are the world, we are not going to see a change. And as I come to simply this issue of climate which will dominate us over the next 45 to 48 days as we go to Egypt, let us remember that the thrust that is needed to fight the causes of our time will not be won by us breaching promises”.
And while regrettably she says while she had hoped for it to be better and seen improvement, she was now convinced more than ever, that there comes a time the world must heed a certain call to come together as one world to make that definable difference. Last year she asked to do the same, Mottley says perhaps we have to keep trying and trying and trying, but the world must stand up if our citizens are to live a better life.
Yet, an optimistic Mottley shared, she still believes “it is possible. But it is up to us to change possibilities into realities”. She reminded those of the promise of ‘Loss and Damage’, which was made to the developing world and particular the small island developing states when they visited Paris and agreed for a global compact. She saluted Denmark for its commitment on Tuesday to be able to propose $13M to a loss and damage fund, representing the acknowledgement by a north Atlantic country that there is a justifiable need and justice in the demand for this loss and damage claim.
Meanwhile, she noted there was not a plan in “granular form how small states will have capacity to meet the commitments have made for NetZero”. The Barbados PM admitted while she was “a big defender of net zero” she saw trouble ahead and the need to pause to get it right”. Defending while small states were and are “making commitments that the world wants to hear”, Mottley says “when those commitments are undermined by the inability to supply the electric cars or the batteries necessary to sustain renewable energy, then we know we have a problem”. To this, she says this is why “natural gas, has been viewed as a bridge toward clean energy. But when the access to natural gas is also affected you better understand why emerging market countries in the Caribbean and in Africa, have determined why they cannot abandon access to gas resources until they are assured they have the capacity to sustain their populations”. It’s at this point, Mottley says “where the rubber meets the ground. And asks to recognize the commitments on loss and damage and that granular detail that matches commitment to capacity are absolutely critical if we are to make serious progress in saving our world”.
She called for countries to recommit in the big matters, but recognize that if we don’t speak truth to our population, and if we don’t explain and have the mature conversations rather than to relate to and rely on the sound bytes, we will find a disconnect between those who are governed and those who are governing.
The Barbados PM remarked that this was the 30th year the resolution has called for the removal of the blockade against Cuba, but has been there for 60 years . She turned this to the United States, urging them “not to be shortsighted in their goals, for in this hemisphere, peace and prosperity is the province of it all”. And while admitting there might be problems on all sides, there is nothing that justifies further hardships to people, because of ideological differences. And if there are human rights differences, she called for them to be resolved, as has been chosen to be done with mightier countries across the world without the imposition of sanctions. She said fairness and transparency demanded it of us.
Mottley concluded that the things she had put forward did not require money, but a “commitment and political will and with the power of the pen, we can impose natural disasters and pandemic clauses in our debt, with the power of the pen we can change the capital that is available to multilateral development banks that will remove the barriers that currently exist for us to fight poverty. A world that reflects and imperialistic order and hypocrisy and a lack of transparency, will not achieve that mission, but one that gives us freedom, transparency and a level playing field will make that definable difference”.