Earlier last month at a conference on Caribbean security, Barbados’ Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, spoke about the consequences of the war in Ukraine and the now unavoidable impact it will have on the cost of food, energy, fertiliser, and transport.
The region’s leaders, she said, must explain to their citizens the need to prepare for what may lie ahead. Warning that over time a “culture of contentment” had beset the Caribbean people, she said that the region’s citizens must now be “better prepared for the present,” and that the countries of the Caribbean must brace for the impact the conflict will have on prices and access to commodities.
Behind her carefully chosen words is an awareness that a seemingly distant war may have a socially destabilising dimension.