PM urges CARICOM to revise treaty for green energy action

Prime Minister Mia Mottley has called for urgent reforms to the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas governing CARICOM to accelerate the bloc’s transition to renewable energy.

Speaking at a high-level regional forum, she urged member states to adopt a unified approach, warning that fragmented efforts are delaying progress in addressing the region’s energy and climate challenges.

She further noted that the region’s fragmented approach is undermining progress.

“If ever there was a time for pooled investment, it is in the area of renewable energy,” Mottley said at the Caribbean High-Level Forum on Managing the Energy Transition.

“Instead of meeting a few times a year and talking about other matters, we now need to add renewable energy to the scope of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas. If we can do that, we can begin to see real change in this region as well as build the resilience necessary to come through the climate crisis successfully.”

The CARICOM treaty focuses on cooperation in trade, commerce, finance, and economic policy.

But Mottley noted that the region’s response to climate and energy challenges demands a similar collective framework to unlock resources, attract investment, and modernise infrastructure.

“The Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas was signed by all of us as members of the community. We have within it the premise of functional cooperation and yet on this most difficult and complex issue of recreation and energy, we have limited or no cooperation,” she said.

Highlighting obstacles to the region’s energy transition, the prime minister named regulatory inefficiencies, procurement challenges, and investment roadblocks.

She pointed to a struggle with the Barbados National Energy Policy, which, according to her, has delayed progress on renewable energy projects.

“We have been struggling over the course of the last four years with a regulatory framework that has not necessarily met the needs of the country. In fact, it has compromised, in some instances, our ability to reach our goal of net zero by 2035,” Mottley said.

She further raised issues with the inability of the region to secure competitive procurement prices due to the small size of individual economies.

“Almost every country in this room will face the reality that their orders are too small… to command attention,” Mottley said.

Calling for pooled procurement, she referenced the success of the African Medical Supplies Platform during the COVID-19 pandemic, which saw the African-CARICOM partnership securing access to resources at competitive prices for even the smallest nations.

The prime minister further noted that she has ordered an audit of the region’s renewable energy capacity, led by the International Finance Corporation (IFC), to guide future investments and projects.

Concluding that collective action would greatly enable progress within the region, she said, “I hope that this discussion today can stimulate the interest among individual countries. First, the cooperation, and then, to recognise that we are always stronger when we move together. And in this world where the rules of the international order are being questioned in many respects, we need solidarity and common action with common purpose.”

Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva, echoed Mottley’s call for integrated action on energy and finance, also agreeing that the two cannot be addressed in silos.

“As long as the conversation about energy and finance happen in parallel and not together, we simply cannot come up with the right instruments that would make it possible for the transition to take place,” Georgieva said.

Noting the additional financial strain that fossil fuel dependency places on Caribbean economies, she said, “When you don’t have fiscal space and yet you have to deploy a big part of it for expensive fossil fuels while you have abundant sun and wind and, in some places, geothermal energy, it just doesn’t make sense.”

The IMF top official shared a renewed commitment to assist the member nations in navigating what she described as “a very complicated, highly unpredictable global environment.”

“I pledge that you will see as an outcome of this meeting, we will do things better, differently, so we can serve our members as they deserve to be served,” she said.

“If we can move together, we will be in a stronger position to meet the demands of the energy transition.”