Prime Minister Mottley today called for fairness and equity as she again challenged the global community to revamp the criteria and definitions used to determine nations’ access to goods and credit during the COVID-19 pandemic.
She said this change must be centred on the needs of countries rather than “simple definitional criteria that make it easier for economists” to categorize where people should go.
Mottley, the current CARICOM chairman, made the case before yet another international forum – dubbed a High-Level Event on Financing for Development in the Era of COVID-19 and Beyond. The virtual meeting was co-convened by Canada, Jamaica and the United Nations.
The Prime Minister reiterated concerns that the Caribbean like other small island developing states were being excluded from critical assistance at a time when they needed it most.
She said: “We have many middle-income countries in our region, and in fact among the small states of the world, and many of us are excluded from access to concessional funding even in the midst of this pandemic when we need access to money to boost our health systems more than ever, when we need access to credit to be able to offset the dislocation that has come from zero revenue from tourism, zero revenue from air travel.
“And what we are not assured of is early access to rapid tests that will allow our countries to open back up safely and to ensure that our population is not exposed in a way that is injurious to them, simply because we want them to have their livelihoods in tourism.”
She suggested future generations will ask what was done during the pandemic to make the world more equitable and just. They will also ask, she said, what had been done now to make countries better capable of meeting the other existential threats of the climate crisis and citizens able to maintain themselves.
Mottley declared: “I hope that the countries of the world can respond that just as 75 years ago we created institutions that were appropriate to the time, that we can say that we created definitions and also modalities that really helped countries and citizens live in a COVID world, rather than simply be collateral damage to the larger countries of the world.”
The Prime Minister insisted that if multilateralism is to mean something in today’s world, then there must be fairness and equity, not only among citizens in a democratic society but among countries in a world that is fair and democratic.
She proffered the view that the time had come for more than words and again said there was a need for a global leadership initiative.
The co-morbidities from chronic NCDs, she pointed out, make citizens more vulnerable to serious conditions and death with respect to COVID-19.
“But yet there is not a development plan that allows us to meet these chronic NCDs favourably for enough of our citizens,” she contended.
The Caribbean, a travel, tourism and trade-dependent region, now faced a trebling of unemployment and a reduction by more than half of government revenues as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, she told the forum. (SD)
