PM outlines challenges to the region’s development

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, (CMC):

Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, has told an international conference here that high crime rates, climate change, global health challenges and restricted access to international development funding are among key factors preventing the region’s further socio-economic development.

Addressing the 16th Ministerial Forum for Development in Latin America and the Caribbean that ended on Friday in Barbados, Mottley said:

“It gives us no pleasure that Latin America and the Caribbean occupy virtually every spot in the top 10 countries in the world with the highest per capita homicide rate,” Mottley said, adding “there is no formal theatre of war in this hemisphere, but the scale of death from crime is unacceptable in almost every corner of the Americas.”

She acknowledged that the Caribbean has made significant progress in “reversing centuries of underdevelopment” over the past 50 years, but that persistent poverty remained a critical challenge.

“We have lifted large numbers of our population out of poverty but the fact that we still have an underbelly of poverty is what must drive us even further and harder than at any other time,” she said, noting that the global environment threatened to push many countries back into poverty, just as they “thought that they had turned the corner”.

She criticised the approach of international lending agencies, noting that access to development funding had worsened precisely when it was most needed.

“We have equally to fight this battle against all who believe that those who have should have more, and those who do not have, should not get. That is a simple way of describing, regrettably, the last five decades, in particular, of how the world has approached the issue of fairness and equity in wealth creation and in poverty eradication,” she said.

“That inequity has bred a level of distrust, at worst, and apathy, at best, at the very time when the world needs to be able to have its population globally helping in the fight against these crises that can all destabilise us.”

Delegations from more than 20 governments from Latin America and the Caribbean are participating in the two-day forum on how to accelerate and protect progress towards human development, social inclusion, and resilience.