By: Staff Writer
July 15, 2022
Caribbean leaders called for stronger trade ties and a deepening of the regional body at the 2022 Concordia Americas Summit in Miami.
Prime Minister of The Bahamas, Philip Davis, QC, told the Summit that the COVID-19 pandemic has shown him that the world is dependent on one another and that trade dialogue is the “bedrock” for cooperation among nations.
Mr Davis also said: “Together, we are we are stronger and able to face the challenges that we face as humanity globally. One of the things that the pandemic exposed to me is that many of the developed and industrialized countries were not as sensitive as they ought to be to small island developing states like ourselves. That even heightened the need for us as small island developing states to be more cooperative, and more engaging with one another, to be able to be one voice to the larger voices of the world.
He added: “I had to remind the industrialized world and the major economies that with the pandemic, we thought that we, as a small island developing states, were not having access to vaccines, and they were, in our view, hoarding vaccines and because they were looking after their people and maybe self-survival is mother’s first nature, but what we have to remind each other, which I reminded them is that they will not be safe, unless we are all safe. Meaning that they need that they need to share the vaccine because we are people on they are protecting will come to our shores.”
Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG), Dr Ralph Gonsalves, also said: “CARICOM consists of 14 independent states, small states and one British Overseas Territory. They have a combined GDP of about $85bn US dollars and population of 19m people with per capita GDP of around $30,000 US dollars a year in the case of the Bahamas, about 1,200 annually in the case of Haiti.
“Whatever we do internally, there are two critical strategic imperatives for economic development, for sustainable development for security: To address the existential issues such as climate change and the financial system we have to do two things, we have to deepen regional cooperation.” He continued, “So there’s regionalism very critically in a strategic sense and multilateralism to be engaged in the global political economy and to have entry points, where you can see particular advantages to do things within your own practical interests. Consistent, of course, with universal principles of engagement, as laid down in the United Nations Charter and the multilateral system generally.
“The the regional integration has to be of an organic kind, in which the strengths and weaknesses of each individual unit is dissolved into the whole, so that the whole becomes more than a summation of the individual parts.”
Without the Caribbean Public Health Agency, which is an institution of CARICOM, the Caribbean would not have been able to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
Additionally in the case of the SVG without the Seismic Research Centre at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad, which all member states contribute too, SVG we would not have been able to address the matter of the La Soufriere volcanic eruptions and as the region goes into the heart of the hurricane season, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) will be critical in helping to monitor storm patterns and be on standby to help any country in the region that would be affected.