UNCTAD conference ‘to go virtual’

Hopes for a major boost to tourism by the hosting of a major United Nations conference here in seven months’ time – already postponed twice from last year – were formally dashed Friday as organisers announced the meeting is to go online.

The 15th meeting of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), to be hosted by Barbados from October 3, will now be held virtually amid the global COVID-19 pandemic, Prime Minister Mia Mottley announced Friday.

Mottley, appearing online with UNCTAD’s Acting Secretary-General Isabelle Durant, said that the intensifying global spread of the virus, the “appallingly inequitable” distribution of vaccines, the uncertainties of international travel and of likely participation numbers, all make it impractical to continue to plan for UNCTAD 15 to be physically held here in October.

But Prime Minister Mottley gave an assurance that negotiations on the Outcome Document for UNCTAD 15 are already proceeding virtually and the formal statements in the General Debate can easily be adapted to that format, as was successfully piloted at last year’s UN General Assembly.

Mottley said: “As for the rest of the programme for UNCTAD 15, the virtual space now gives us almost unlimited scope to make our Conference an exceptional experience.

“An experience that transcends the boundaries of a single week in October, but can build-up to and outlast that week in whatever ways our imagination wishes to take it.”

She also assured that the National Organising Committee will work in close partnership with the UNCTAD Secretariat in Geneva to develop comprehensive new plans for the virtual staging of UNCTAD 15.

The Conference, which is UNCTAD’s highest decision-making body, was initially scheduled to be held from October 18 to 23, 2020. But the pandemic forced the conference to be postponed twice, as organizers explored safe bubbles and biospheres, and how to reconfigure spaces and locations.

Secretary-General Durant said that she and Prime Minister Mottley were concerned about the fragility of times, and of the immense suffering caused by the health crisis and its tremendous consequences, particularly in the developing world and for the most vulnerable groups.

Durant said there was a responsibility to respond to that extreme fragility and to ensure that UNCTAD 15 seizes the momentum, focuses on the essentials, and is a key moment for discussions and decisions that will guide member states on the road to recovery.

“We will be the first to present to the world an international conference, in the wake of the pandemic, dedicated to the most promising junction for human well being: trade and development, and by extension: economy and development,” Durant said.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development became a permanent intergovernmental agency in 1964, dealing with trade, investment, and development issues. (AH)