Regional leaders conclude their annual summit on Wednesday.

By Peter Richards

 

MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica, CMC - Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries are developing a new model to get the international community to re-assess how it provides financial and other assistance to the region, President Bharrat Jagdeo said here on Tuesday.

 

Jagdeo said that the presence of the Secretaries General of the United Nations and the Organisation of American States (OAS), and the managing director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) at the 31st CARICOM summit here was part of the strategy to sell the model to the international community.

 

“I am extremely pleased that they saw it fit to come here,” Jagdeo said, adding however “that this did not happen by chance”.

 

He said CARICOM had been putting “increasing pressure” on those leaders to visit the Caribbean for talks with regional leaders.

 

“They came prepared, they came with a brief of the state of the economy of the region and so they were aware of our biggest challenges, they were aware of the challenge to construct a viable development strategy - medium and long term - in light of the situation that we face with the global crisis.

 

“They were aware of the immediate problems ... of some countries of the region experience,” Jagdeo said, adding that one of the ways these institutions, particularly the IMF, can help “is to make greater access from some of the facilities they have in place”.

 

He said what the Caribbean wanted also from these institutions is support for “a new model of development appropriate to small developing countries that would be significantly different from the model pursued by the  larger developing countries”.

 

Jagdeo said he “argued” with UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon that his organisation also needed to change its lexicon “to be supportive of this (new) model”.

 

He said within the UN there are three categories of countries, namely developed, developing countries and less developed countries, and that “from time to time they enter into discussions with Small Island Developing States (SIDS) but it is not entered into a major way in the development lexicon of the United Nations.

 

“Unless it is done so, then this group of countries to which we belong to, would not be seen as a special category of countries with real vulnerabilities that are different from others, requiring different sets of development tools to address their concerns.”

 

Jagdeo said in this new model building the Caribbean would need to garner political support from several countries, including those in the G8 and the heads of the multi-lateral financial institutions.

 

“Now we need to do more of the technical work to support our case. Once we have those three together we may be able to succeed in changing the development paradigm for our region and to get a series of things that we are arguing for, special instruments that would allow us to prosper”.

 

He said the new model concept may influence the discussions at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) because “right now the focus has been on LDCs requiring special and deferential treatment but not Caribbean countries because they don’t recognise us as a special category.

 

“It could influence tremendously the final outcome of the WTO agreement. It could influence the provision of debt relief for the first time ever for middle income countries if we succeed in getting the model in place. It would allow us to get a significant chunk of the money set aside for  climate change ... so the first task has to be model building,” Jagdeo said.

 

The Guyanese leader acknowledged that while the Caribbean has been speaking about the new model “for some time...frankly speaking I don’t see enough of this enthusiasm on the part of many of our development thinkers to push this model”.

 

Jagdeo told reporters that there has also not been a “coordinated lobby” approach to the pushing the model, but insisted “there is a serious attempts among the heads to pursue this vigorously.

 

“I have seen the enthusiasm surrounding the initiative ... because we have to convince people that this is the way out. Many people thought individually, I think that we can solve problems and get changes within the international community, and I think the thought was naive,” he said.

 

“Unless you change the facilities no single country will be able to get debt write off or special treatment. So now all of the heads are seized not only with the sense that we need this model, but we need it badly, I anticipate that our lobbying efforts will increase significantly,” he said.

 

CMC