Home  News International News Leaders trash trade agreements
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Leaders trash trade agreements |
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Monday, 06 October 2008 |
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They also noted that to date only five countries have met their commitment to contribute less than one per cent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to the Official Development Assistance (ODA).
St. Lucia’s Prime Minister Stephenson King said that while his island appreciates the efforts of countries which have met the established the ODA, it was urging other countries to act quickly "so that the target may not have to be shifted upwards due to increased poverty worldwide".
Prime Minister Hubert Ingraham of the Bahamas, like his CARICOM colleagues, is calling for “effective, permanent representation of developing countries" - particularly small countries - in international economic, trade and financial organizations such as the Bretton Woods institutions and the WTO.
His Barbados counterpart, David Thompson, said the current global crisis could not be solved by those responsible for it because they also “created, controlled and manipulated the global financial system for their own advantage”.
As Thompson sees it, developing countries must take the lead in finding a way out of the problem and agrees with Ingraham that they must also be given a greater say in decision-making processes in international financial institutions.
The leaders of Antigua and Barbuda and St. Kitts-Nevis said it was also important for the international community to re-think their trade and economic policies which they said were having disastrous effects on developing countries like those in the Caribbean.
Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer of Antigua and Barbuda and his St.Kitts-Nevis counterpart, Dr. Denzil Douglas, told the General Assembly there was need to embrace multilateralism to the fullest, while noting that the debate was taking place against the backdrop of "escalating challenges to international peace and security; unalleviated poverty and diminishing food supplies for much of the world's population; mega disasters induced by climate change; and impending meltdown in the world's largest economy".
Also addressing the UNGA was the recently-elected Prime Minister of Grenada, Tillman Thomas, who listed the steps being taking to build a new and prosperous economy, including revitalizing the cocoa and nutmeg industries; boosting labor productivity; fostering a knowledge-based export services sector; and modernizing the tax system.
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