– already seeing direct benefits, PM Spencer says
Antigua & Barbuda formalized its participation in ALBA (the Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas) on Wednesday and Prime Minister Winston Baldwin Spencer says that through that and its associated PetroCaribe Agreement his country has benefited from a US$8M water infrastructure project, hundreds of scholarships, and price reduction of utilities for pensioners.
“Among other things, my country has benefited directly from the Mission Milagro project, a US$8M water infrastructure development project, hundreds of scholarships, the reduction in the price of utilities for pensioners, food subsidies for the disabled and economically disadvantaged,” Prime Minister Spencer said in a statement of accession to ALBA.
He said that since its creation in December 2004, ALBA has positively impacted the lives of millions of citizens and residents in the participating territories and indeed the wider region.
“Life-altering and life-giving projects conceptualized and implemented through ALBA and the associated PetroCaribe Agreement have served to reduce poverty, illiteracy, morbidity and mortality in many countries, including Antigua and Barbuda,” the Prime Minister declared.
And based on research conducted by Professor Norman Girvan, he said further, it is known that PetroCaribe’s concessionary financing arrangements provided some $1.17 billion between June 2005 and December 2007, while US Foreign Assistance to the Caribbean for the comparable period was estimated at $340M per year.
He also pointed out that the Inter-American Development Bank’s disbursements to the 16 countries participating in PetroCaribe were less than 25 percent of PetroCaribe’s average lending. The picture is the same when one examines the level of support from the European Union, Spencer added.
Further, he asserted, “the support that has been received through PetroCaribe did not come at the price of our dignity or sovereignty but rather was firmly rooted in the principles of complementarity, solidarity, cooperation and respect for sovereignty.”
No wavering
Meanwhile, the Antigua & Barbuda prime minister affirmed that his country’s accession “does not in any way signal a wavering of our commitment to integration at the level of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States and Caricom.”
According to Spencer, his country’s participation in ALBA is without prejudice to its obligations under the Treaty of Basseterre, the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas and other proposed economic and political alliances among member states of the OECS and Caricom.
“In fact, we believe that our engagement in PetroCaribe and ALBA provides opportunities for even higher levels of cooperation at the sub-regional level,” Spencer maintained, adding that one example is the plan for the Eastern Caribbean territories participating in PetroCaribe to establish Antigua and Barbuda as a central storage and transshipment point before the end of the year.
In taking the decision to become a participating member of ALBA, Spencer declared, Antigua & Barbuda was “asserting the fundamental right of a sovereign nation to engage in cooperative relations based on mutual respect.”
Spencer also contended that the principles that govern ALBA are diametrically opposed to those associated with failed neoliberal development models. He argued that ALBA “promotes complimentarity as an alternative to competition; solidarity as opposed to domination; cooperation as a replacement for exploitatation; and respect for sovereignty rather than corporate rule,” and Antigua & Barbuda embraces those principles without reservation.
The concept of ALBA was first articulated by Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez in 2004, and the grouping currently includes Venezuela, Cuba, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Dominica and St Vincent and the Grenadines.
Spencer in his accession statement also observed that the global financial system with its capitalist underpinnings had failed, not because of the actions of debt-burdened, vulnerable economies of the developing world but rather because of the actions of the large economies of the developed world, as well as the actions of the financial institutions in the economies that set the rules for world finance.
According to the Prime Minister, the “historically rich and proud countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have suffered greatly as a result of coercive and imperialistic models of colonialism and later the Washington Consensus.”
In his view, he said, the fundamental underpinning of such models “is the reduction of the role of the state in domestic policy making in tandem with increased control by foreign capital, whether such capital originates with a foreign government, an international financial institution or with multinational corporations.”
He argued further that it has been estimated that under those failed models, for each dollar of aid that was received by developing countries ten dollars left through capital flight.
It was that capital flight along with the neglect of the social infrastructure and other issues related to quality of life, which impoverished the resource-rich countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, Spencer concluded.
