St Lucian entrepreneur urges region look inward for sustainability

Stop playing the victim and start doing what you can for yourself to achieve sustainable development before looking outside of your country for assistance, a St Lucia-based entrepreneur has told government officials in a United Nations-sponsored forum on Wednesday.

Johanan Dujon delivered a blunt call for greater political will, improvement in the enabling environment and easier private sector access to financing to be among the factors for the region to tackle some of its developmental challenges.

Dujon, the founder of agricultural biotech company Algas Organics, was addressing the UNDP High-Level Political Forum virtual side event held under the theme, Unleashing the Potential of the Blue Economy.

He said: “I think as Caribbean people there are things we need to do for ourselves rather than waiting for others to do it, and then once we actually get these things going I think that’s when you can actually engage development partners, moving in a joint direction. That is political capital and just the political will really to make changes.

“I think internally what needs to happen… is that we need to move away from the victim mentality. Yes, we are prone to exogenous shocks and we have heard this at every conference for the last 20 years, and it is true. But what are we going to do about it, because saying that does not prevent them from happening. So we need to move away from what I have seen in my experience of the victim mentality to ‘this is the reality, how do we mitigate those risks and also how do we capitalize on some of the opportunities that may exist as far as that is concerned.”

Pointing to the estimated low investment of only about one per cent of gross domestic product that was spent on research and development in the region, Dujon also called for greater investment in that area and for the research to actually be used to produce change.

He told the forum, which was attended by Minister of Maritime Affairs and the Blue Economy Kirk Humphrey, that enough studies have been done over the years “on almost every issue the Caribbean has faced since the Caribbean became the Caribbean in terms of the geopolitical aspect of things”.

“If you are not investing in sustainable technologies to improve processes and productivity then you are not going to grow. That is as simple as it is,” Dujon said.

“There are reams on regional integration, there are reams on diversification, and the last thing we need is more research and information and reports to just sit on a shelf. So we need to move away as a region from research for research’s sake and actually allow the research to drive policy, but more so innovation because innovation doesn’t require political will. Companies will innovate because they need to survive and that innovation if it is happening cumulatively, will drive economic growth.”

Stressing that the private sector will play a critical role in countries achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goals over the next several years, he added that development financing would play a critical part in that process.

He said: “I think development financing should not be concentrated solely in the hands of the public sector. I mean, high debt, fragile economies, and limited innovation do not make for strong businesses cases, especially for sustainable growth in the post-COVID situation.

“So the public sector as we have seen does not always innovate or create new products which sustainably drive economies. What you find is that the focus is usually on infrastructure and paying the public sector wage bill and servicing debt.

“That is how you keep a country open but it isn’t how you are going [achieve] sustainable development, and so I see entrepreneurs playing a pivotal role when it comes to development outside of the role of what we call traditional business. So we are looking at agricultural technology and blue technologies.”

Dujon further explained that the intellectual property development and protection and innovation with the “right” partner in the private sector could be a “game-changer for the region”.

He also recommended that in addition to improvements to the doing business environment in the region, there needed to be greater access to grant funding and follow-up funding to help drive innovation.

“We need to de-risk innovation,” he said, adding “it is one thing to talk innovation but it is another thing to fund it. Innovation without funding is basically a daydream; really a nightmare. I think for too long the two have been divorced and that is the reason results have not been as strong as we like in the region”.

“Once those are built out we are not going to just encourage entrepreneurs who live in the Caribbean to invest there, we are also going to encourage foreign direct investment outside of tourism.”  (marlonmadden@barbadostoday.bb)