C’bean strong but fragile: Global interdependence at its highest now Loop Barbados

Black Immigrant Daily News

Barbados is ready and willing to engage and do business with the world, but mindful that the global environment is hostile and becoming even more so daily.

However, despite its size, Barbados can play a “serious” role in making the world a better place once given the chance by other countries and players. This is the belief of Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley.

Speaking on the first day of the inaugural FinTech Islands Global Conference (FiX 2022), which got underway at Hilton Barbados, today, October 5, she said:

“We can only exist if people from the rest of the world allow us to exist. And I say that not meaning in any way to be subservient, and those who know me would know that’s not my posture, but the reality of global interdependence is greater now than it has ever been in the world in which we live.”

She used the examples of North Korea testing missiles over Japan “with impunity” and the decision by OPEC+ to cut production by two million barrels per day from November 2023 to make her point.

“This morning OPEC took decisions today to cut production again as if the world needed another problem to resolve, and for those of us who breathed a sigh of relief when oil prices came down in recent months, we now have to face the awful spectacle of what that will mean combined with the increase in interest rates that have been triggered by a strong US dollar and the actions taken by the Fed in order to contain inflation.”

PM Mottley said, “this world in which we live is highly, highly unstable.”

Explaining that some wearing rose coloured glasses may believe that because it appears to be business as usual on the surface with everyone going along and looking like normal, she said that that is far from the fact.

“The combination of the pandemic, along with the climate crisis, as we’ve seen in Pakistan, as we’ve seen in Florida, as those in the North Atlantic countries felt with the redefinition of Third World’s ’96 degrees in the shade’ this summer, that these things literally are affecting hundreds of millions of people who regrettably, are now either being pauperised having made the journey out of poverty, or being cemented in to a situation where that journey from poverty is becoming more and more illusive.”

And she stressed further, that just as in the past when people used to say, if North America sneezes Barbados and the rest of the region catches the cold, that this is even truer now.

“One of the disadvantages of being small is that the global context which I just described to you can literally, literally offset. Let us for one minute imagine the hurricane Ian did not hit the west coast of Florida, but hit the East Coast of Florida, and took up Miami. What would be the implications for Jamaica, Bahamas, Guyana, Barbados, St Lucia, St Kitts, let’s go through all of the islands with the exception of Cuba, who already blockaded, and regrettably, still, the subject of sanctions for 60 years of the blockade sorry, for 60 years? The implications for the rest of us would be devastating, largely because we depend on food, not to mention critical supplies and medical equipment, and those other things from those entities outside. And that’s why I say that we live as well as the rest of the world allows us to live.

“And that is why our voice on the global stage cannot be one that is literally just that of a passive observer, but one that speaks truth to power, largely because the world has recognized that global public goods are critical for global stability.”

NewsAmericasNow.com