By Neville J. Bissember
It is commendable that as Chairman of CARICOM, H.E. President Irfaan Ali was able to call an emergency meeting of his colleague Heads of Government within hours to strategise the Community’s response in the wake of the destruction visited upon the Caribbean by Hurricane Beryl last week, specifically in Grenada and its outlying island of Carriacou, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and with less intensity, Barbados and Jamaica. Praise be to the Almighty for the minimal but nevertheless unfortunate loss of life; Beryl’s toll will be measured more in terms of loss in the infrastructure, housing and agricultural sectors. This however is small comfort, as it will nevertheless register as a not insignificant setback to life, development and the accumulation of GDP in those island nations.
To quote His Excellency, ‘[T]he extent of destruction here will definitely require international support, not only immediate financial support in the form of grants and long-term low-interest concessional loans but also help in terms of restructuring existing loans’ There was also agreement among regional leaders ‘to reach out to all stakeholders to commence discussions on international support’.
Yet, I can hear the skeptics saying this is “too little too late” and that the integration movement is once again in reactive mode, rather than having acted with foresight and pre-planning for such a disaster. Indeed the skeptics on this occasion may be on to something as it is an indisputable fact that some things in life are inevitably predictable – old age, Christmas, your partner’s birthday and yes, the annual hurricane season. Let me leave the fortunes of West Indies (test) cricket out of this!
Last week’s emergency meeting of CARICOM Heads would presumably have addressed themes that have been under intellectual scrutiny since the last century, at the instance of the Commonwealth Secretariat, under the stewardship of a brilliant economist, former Barbados Prime Minister Owen Arthur (of blessed memory). The Commonwealth counts more than half of its 54 members as small states, and the Commonwealth Ministerial Group on Small States had started back then to advance the concept of vulnerability, notwithstanding the relatively impressive per capita income of members like The Bahamas, Mauritius or Malaysia. All it takes is one climate catastrophe to set these small economies back by years.
The climate event that passed through the region last week – the earliest category 5 storm in the Atlantic on record – took me back some years ago during my previous life in the CARICOM Secretariat, in the supporting role as Adviser to the former Secretary General, Ambassador Irwin LaRocque. In the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the UNDP, under the leadership of its then Administrator, former New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark, constituted a High-level Group called the “Political Champions for Disaster Resilience”, including heavy hitters like then UN USG for Humanitarian Affairs Baroness Valerie Amos – Guyanese by birth – at the time in charge of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA); successive UK International Development Secretaries; with senior representation from USAID, the EU and the World Bank. Ambassador LaRocque accepted the invitation to become one of the Political Champions for Disaster Resilience, and the task of point person in the Secretary General’s office fell to your humble servant.
Apart from visiting Haiti to gain first-hand knowledge of the situation, the Political Champions met regularly in New York and in the margins of the biannual World Bank meetings, to advance the agenda of resilience building. Ambassador LaRocque introduced the concept of the Caribbean’s vulnerability into the discussion. For his sterling efforts, he was invited by President Bill Clinton to become part of the Clinton Global Initiative, in the wake of another devasting Cat 5 Hurricane, Maria, in September 2017. Referring to the SG, President Clinton opined that he brought to the table a perspective on behalf of small island developing states all too familiar with the devastation and destruction that came with these severe climate events.
As the discussion advanced, CARICOM was able to build a coalition which included UNSG Antonio Gutteres, who visited Dominica in the wake of Maria. This was after Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit made an impassioned address to the UN General Assembly, urging members to disregard (high) per capita income as the criteria for denying his country concessional loans, when the whole economy upon which that criteria was based, had just been devastated. Thereafter the UNSG often included refences to vulnerability in his several addresses on the plight of small states. As testimony to his partnership, Mr. Gutteres attended every July meeting of the CARICOM Summit until Covid impacted international travel.
At a World Bank meeting in Peru, the Minister of Finance of the Seychelles supported the vulnerability initiative as a like-minded state and Ms. Clark threw the political weight of the UNDP into the advocacy. From all indications, while the idea of calculating a “vulnerability index” was regarded as economically sound by the technical staff of the World Bank, support for the initiative did not achieve the critical mass for the allocation of resources.
In other words, the exact same words quoted from President Ali last week, have been articulated by a series of decision makers for years now. The call for ‘…grants…concessional loans…restructuring’ has consistently been made. For instance, some years ago, a leader in a storm ridden island reflected that a bridge for which a loan had been secured to build it had been washed away, and while it was still being repaid, yet another loan would have to be sought to do reconstructive work!
Led by CDEMA and coordinated by the CARICOM Secretariat, the Community had pursued a number of laudable initiatives in collaboration with other Community Institutions and our development partners over the years. These include stocks of solar lamps and batteries, emergency supply chains for Meals Ready to Eat (MRE) and other foodstuff, potable water and portable water pumps, stand-by generators, more resilient crop seed types that CARDI had been pioneering, more weather resistant and collapsible satellite towers, and enhanced building codes and structural techniques. Make no mistake, all of these, with a particular emphasis on the welfare of vulnerable groups, make a significant difference in the aftermath of a severe climate event.
However the stark reality is that the Member States that are in the hurricane belt will need more than shiploads of supplies and boots on the ground, as commendable as are the collective efforts of government and the private sector in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. What then, could be the solution?
A permanent standalone emergency disaster fund needs to established, with rapid disbursement capability, devoid of red tape, feasibility studies and consultants, monetized in the amount of US$5-10 Billion. A possible model could be the EU’s European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations (ECHO), but very often what is required is budgetary support and large-scale ready-to-go funding, way beyond the 1M Euro and US$4.5M that the EU and USAID have already generously allocated in response to Beryl. Besides, a study many years ago – admittedly before the establishment of ECHO – found that it required 20-odd signatures before EU resources could be released in the normal scheme of things. My guess is that that bureaucracy has thankfully been revamped.
For the idea of a permanent disaster fund to be viable, the obvious question would be from where would the financial resources come? It would seem to me to be the case that if the Western countries could fork out in the vicinity of US$200 billion over two-plus years which had left a path of death, destruction and displacement in Ukraine, then a fund of the magnitude of 5% of that amount, for strictly humanitarian needs and disaster relief, ought not to be an insurmountable challenge. If one were to add the cost of the war in Gaza, or the hundreds of billions in financial capital destruction and frozen assets suffered by Russia, US$5-10 billion does not appear unreasonable. Unlike the funds that are actually expended on war materiel, the disaster fund would only be accessed in times of serious natural disasters and could be invested in revenue raising ventures in the off-season.
If an objection were to be raised that taxpayers’ money in the developed countries cannot be set aside for such an otherwise commendable purpose, then another obvious source would be the billions of dollars accumulated by that select few who control almost half of the world’s wealth. According to a January 2023 Oxfam publication, ‘[T]he richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020’. Per Reuters, ‘[T]wo percent of adults command half of the world’s wealth’. Again, this is not to gainsay the generous philanthropy of organisations like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or that of Jeff Bezos, his first wife Mackenzie Scott or Mark Zuckerberg. Besides, it is their money, so if they want to spend it on philanthropy, or a new yacht, that is entirely up to them.
It is clear to me that in pursuing this alternative option of financing for any emergency disaster fund, what would be required is a coincidence of interests, a meeting of the minds between the leaders of the small islands developing states and those in the super-wealthy income bracket. One possible model had come in October 2017 in the wake of Hurricane Maria, when the sitting Chairman of CARICOM Prime Minister Keith Mitchell of Grenada and billionaire Sir Richard Branson announced the launch of the Caribbean Climate Smart Coalition during the World Bank’s High-Level Meeting on Recovery and Resilience in the Caribbean. Intended to make the Caribbean a “climate-smart zone”, this public-private partnership of 26 countries and over 40 private and public sector partners was supported by the World Bank, the IDB and the CDB. Later that year at President Macron’s One Planet Summit to review progress (or lack thereof?) on the Paris Agreement, the concept of a Climate-Smart Accelerator was rolled out, around the theme of “Building Back Better”.
With an ambitious programme of fund-raising led by the stature of Sir Richard, and the IDB committing $1B, of which $3M was start-up funds, the Accelerator was formally launched by Prime Minister Andrew Holness in Jamaica in August 2018, with a number of headliners in attendance, including Usain Bolt and Sean Paul being named as Accelerator Ambassadors. Alas, even though its projects in such areas as clean energy and ocean resiliency were impressive, the initiative faltered for a lack of funding…but I did get to share the stage with the world’s fastest man, albeit representing Ambassador LaRocque, who could not attend because of a prior commitment made to another CARICOM Prime Minister!
And how is this meeting of the minds to take place, if not through a concerted, collaborative conversation? Again, there is no need to go re-inventing the wheel: when CARICOM was faced some years ago with confronting the challenge of major Western banks severing their corresponding relationship with our financial institutions, a core group of Heads of Government, led by Prime Minister Gaston Browne of Antigua and Barbuda, set off to Washington for engagements with key decision makers and legislators, including the Congressional Black Caucus. From all reports, they got a sympathetic reception.
A similar well thought out and articulated engagement – a roll-up the shirt sleeves kind of frank, impassioned conversation, supported by anecdotal and statistical evidence – needs to be organised between a small group of CARICOM leaders – the OECS leadership must have pride of place here – and the likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Mukesh Ambani, Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, Larry Page, Aliko Dangote, the list goes on…in other words, the movers and shakers in the global financial architecture. While it might be a challenge, on many fronts, to get all of these personalities in the same place and time zone at the same time, some of their own virtual technology could make the meeting a reality.
Hopefully, the willingness of these financial moguls to extend their on-going philanthropy into the area of climate resilience and disaster preparedness and mitigation in the Caribbean would nudge the decision-makers in the International Financial Institutions to diminish their reluctance and “put their money where the conscience of the developing world is”. For good measure, other high-profile personalities like Kamala Harris (Jamaica), Lewis Hamilton (Grenada), Sir Clive Lloyd (Guyana) Naomi Osaka and Usain Bolt (both Jamaica) could be tapped to play a role in raising public awareness of the vicious cycle the Member States of CARICOM face annually in the fight against climate change, which is largely the result of irresponsibility and short-sightedness of Western industrialised countries over the centuries.
Some years ago, it was explained to me in clear and precise terms the rationale for changing the name of our premier disaster agency CDERA, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Response Agency, to CDEMA – the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency. The mindset of responding was no longer cutting it: we had to become involved as a matter of urgency in forward planning, forecasting, mitigation, building resilience, a whole range of priorities other than ex post facto reacting. This was a sine qua non for our survival, as sea level rise and global warming continued to barrel down on us – the call for 1.5 degrees to stay alive is no joke
Hence a similar re-orientation needs to occur in the board rooms in Washington and the corridors of power among the planet’s wealthiest philanthropic citizenry, as CARICOM once again advances the case for a vulnerability index to displace per capita income when assessing responses to major climate events such as Beryl. Last week’s meeting should ideally have been called since the 2023 hurricane season ended, given the inexorable predictability of these increasingly furious climate events. Rather than repeat the same things that Owen Arthur brought us to since the last century, CARICOM needs right now to formulate a strategy led by the OECS Member States in order to target key decision makers in the world of global finance – institutional, governmental and private – to prepare, or as CDEMA would no doubt prefer, to unlock substantial financing to mitigate climate events, as we go forward in this continuing cycle of climate destruction. Otherwise, as a former CARICOM Ambassador in Brussels used to famously say, “We just spinning top in mud!”