With the participation, as full members, of Guyana, Suriname and Belize from Caricom, the small island developing states of the globe concluded their third full meeting since 1994 under the auspices of the United Nations last week. On this occasion they placed some emphasis on mitigation of the causes and effects of climate change on development, this being the theme of a forthcoming UN Climate Change Summit to be held on September 23 this year.
Countries like Jamaica, St Lucia, St Vincent and Dominica will certainly have welcomed this focus, given the ravages of persistent rain, then described as a trough, that disrupted roads, rivers, housing and health conditions last Christmas, reminding citizens of how easily extensively built physical structures, rivers, and other physical arrangements facilitating development, can quickly be wiped away.
The Third Small Island Developing States (SIDS) International Conference was a good occasion to remind Caribbean populations that this was an initiative born, so to speak, within our Region, when Barbados hosted the first SIDS conference in 1994. This was meant to focus on the peculiarities and differences between small and large island entities, developed or underdeveloped, existing in extensive sea environments, that merited special consideration and assistance from the international community. And in effect, the claim has been for special consideration for these entities vis-à-vis other kinds of states, for example, land-locked states.
This emphasis has been kept alive through a series of conferences at regional and international levels meant to focus major decision-makers on what SIDS have claimed to be “their unique and particular vulnerabilities and development needs” that distinguish them from other developed and developing countries. And from the 1994 Barbados Programme of Action through to the 2005 Mauritius Strategy of Implementation to what is now referred to as the Samoa Pathway Declaration out of this year’s meeting, they have continued to insist on a differentiation between themselves and other states, asserting that “small island developing States remain a special case for sustainable development,” without which development “success will remain difficult.”
In the first 1994 Barbados Conference Declaration the position was taken that SIDS were subject to a “greater risk of marginalization” because of their “small size, remoteness from large markets and high economic vulnerability to economic and natural shocks beyond domestic control.” But from the perspective of the Caribbean, the first and last of these indices had more direct relevance and continue to do so.
Yet it was also in that period that the new WTO trading regime’s rules for free trade came into existence and led to the disruption of the trade in agriculture in particular, with large markets then accessible to Caribbean states, as the larger developed countries gave no consideration to the possible effects of that new regime.
In that connection, some interesting data was provided at a side event to the Samoa Conference by the Deputy Secretary General of the Commonwealth Deodat Maharaj, when he indicated that while the annual compound growth rate of per capita income of SIDS between 1970 and 2000 was 0.73%, that of the world economy was 2.70%; that in the period 2000-2012 “SIDS had one of the lowest annual compound growth rates at 1.23%” compared with “1.5 for the global economy; 4.9% for developing economies; 4.0% for the LDC’s and 3.23% for sub-Saharan Africa. All these outperformed SIDS.”
In addition Maharaj observed that “Commonwealth research has shown that countries most exposed to preference loss are mainly SIDS such as St Lucia St Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, Jamaica and St Vincent and the Grenadines” though in that list he also included Belize and Guyana.
This suggests, surely, the need for Caricom countries continuing to strongly emphasise the issue of the global conditions and environment for the economies of small states, in addition to the conditions emanating from physical occurrences like climate change.
In respect of another concern of the SIDS, emphasis was placed on the large areas of seas (Exclusive Economic Zones) which some countries in the Pacific have little capacity to monitor, and therefore exert control over. But in the Caribbean the central issue continues to be cost-effective transportation of goods and persons, whether by sea or by air, an issue over which Caricom governments, as a collective, seem unwilling to give consistent attention to.
As the interest of the great, and not-so-great, powers shift to the fast growing areas of the Asia-Pacific, and in some cases Africa, the tendency will be for them to forget the economic concerns of the Caribbean, leaving our arena to the IMF. But as Canadian governments well recognized in the 1960s, the issue of scale was a difficult one for individual West Indian islands to cope with, and they, for example, responded by offering ships for regular inter-Caribbean travel.
Our Caribbean governments, whether through their own initiatives, or through inducing private sector cooperation seem unwilling to face this challenge; and they may well feel that in the new era of globalization and private-sector induced growth, this is a challenge to be left to the private sector. But even as the Third SIDS Conference concludes, it might be worthwhile to raise this issue in the international arena. Yet, in the central geographical area of the Caribbean Sea, the metropolitan powers remain with their dependencies, ensuring that the issue of transportation is not a negative for the populations there.
Even in respect of events like the SIDS conferences, inducing the cooperation of those countries, no doubt in the form of the EU, could be pursued.
