Gonsalves critical of international support towards SIDS

UNITED NATIONS (CMC):

St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves, Friday said while small island developing states (SIDS) have made incremental advances, they have nonetheless been a situation akin to going up a down escalator.

Addressing the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Gonsalves said that as a result, SIDS have found themselves in which the down escalator is moving at a faster pace than the upward baby steps.

“Frequently, it appears as though much of the powerful would wish that SIDS did not exist. But here we are stubborn as the heavens; we are not going anywhere despite our massive vulnerabilities. Our people have a permanence in this world even if some of our lands wash away; we have a voice, and we will continue to use it,” he said.

Gonsalves said despite a quarter century of analysis, advocacy, and prescriptions set forth by the leaders of SIDS and international institutions charged with advancing the interest of SIDS, “our travails are enduring in a global community largely disinterested in our well-being and that of small states generally. We in SIDS remain unequally yoked in a global community motivated by the baser instincts of the untrammelled power of money, ideology, guns, lethal weaponry, territorial and global dominance.”

Gonsalves said that SIDS demand as of right especial support from the international community to address efficaciously the unique social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities of SIDS, in the interest of the nearly 70 million people who permanently occupy the seascape and landscape of SIDS.

He said small island exceptionalism ought to be a category embedded formally in international law and accorded most favourable treatment.

“Rather than securing a most favourable treatment, the SIDS are required to fight to maintain even the special considerations which Providence or serendipity has bestowed upon them,” Gonsalves said, noting that a case in point is the attempt, currently, by the International Development Association (IDA) to pit the most vulnerable, the SIDS, against the poorest countries in its quest to tighten the terms under which qualifying SIDS, of a particular income level, such as St Vincent and the Grenadines, obtain soft-loans through the World Bank-IDA nexus.”

Gonsalves said that in any event, why is the World Bank persisting with the “single, anachronistic and ill-designed metric of average per capita income in respect of vulnerable SIDS” in the age of the Anthropocene, as against a more comprehensive and sensible measure of a Multi-dimensional Vulnerability Index.

He said that the unvarnished truth is that the developed countries have not kept their promises to the SIDS, except the most marginal ones.

“Importantly, the countries of the developed world, the major historic, and contemporary emitters of greenhouse gases, have failed and/or refused to keep their solemn commitments of restricting the global temperature at below 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels.

“Unless there are drastic alterations in the patterns of consumption, production, life, and living in developed, and large emerging economies, our planet is inexorably on a path to a proverbial hell in a hand-basket.”

Gonsalves said in the process, countries of an island or seaboard civilisation are likely to be inundated by raging seas and enveloped in searing heat.