One of the Caribbean’s longest-serving politicians, former Barbados Deputy Prime Minister Mia Mottley has told a Carib-bean Export Development (Caribbean Export) business forum in Kingston, Jamaica that the region now needs a new “development vision to replace the now outdated ones that we have gone through over the past half a century.”
Asserting that there is now a need for a new blueprint to guide regional export growth and enrichment, Mottley told the gathering of mostly regional businessmen that the Caribbean had gone through “all kinds of experiments over the past 50 years spanning industrialization, import substitution, opportunities that balance the desire to bring people out of poverty, but constrained by old structures of production and in more recent times the neo-liberal vision that has rendered us susceptible to the dilution of local and empowerment enfranchisement through foreign capital and foreign investment being the primary mechanism, through which production is obtained in our countries.”
Well known for her outspokenness on domestic and regional social, economic and political issues, Mottley told the forum that while the old “experiments” had realized some gains by modernizing some facets of Caribbean society and lifting some people out of poverty they had also created a situation in which “the rate at which the gains are coming and the risk of pauperization for too many of our people who have made it is real” and that requires that we “take fresh guard again.”
Mia Mottley
And according to Mottley, the prevailing circumstances in the Caribbean raise the spectre of fragmentation allied to the real possibility that Caribbean people could become insular and myopic. “We have to recognize that however much it may appear expedient to focus on national affairs that is in fact a recipe towards undermining not just national entities but (undermining ourselves) as a regional collective.” The veteran Barbadian politician said that those sectors that will accelerate development in the Caribbean are all rooted in human capital, with each citizen having the capacity to achieve what she/he can through education, ex-ploitation of opportunity and application of her/his creative capital.
According to the former deputy prime minister it was ironic that the solutions to the challenges facing the region were likely to derive not simply from the importation of foreign investment nor from accessing aid but from putting policies and programmes in place to allow the people of the region to be engines of wealth-creation sustainable growth.
“Too many countries are capable of leap-frogging the Caribbean region because technology has made geography and distance completely irrelevant in a way it was not 40 to 50 years ago,” Mottley said.
