UNITED NATIONS, CMC—Barbados announced Friday that it is launching a third iteration of the Bridgetown Initiative, identifying three fundamental principles. The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) country continues to call for urgent and decisive action to reform the international financial architecture (IFA).
Addressing the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA), Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley told the international community that her island’s call for a fundamental reset includes attitudes and actions or reforms.
Mottley said that nowhere is reform, and consequentially, trust and hope, more important than the global financial architecture.
She said restricted access to capital, its disproportionately high cost, inadequate scale, and the overwhelming burden of debt are now combining to force governments in the world’s poorest countries and, frankly, across many vulnerable middle-income countries to devote more resources to debt service than to health, education, and infrastructure combined.
“For far too many members of the human family, to paraphrase (the late Jamaican singer) Bob Marley, “cold ground is their bed and rock is their pillow.”
“Too many millions go to bed with their bellies hungry. And too many have no bed. Our reset must, therefore, collectively build a common agenda that reflects and reinforces our shared humanity. It is that shared humanity which binds us together.”
Mottley said that Barbados’ call for a fundamental reset includes attitudes as much as actions or reforms and that leaders agree that “we must trigger national development agendas of transformation with both speed and scale.
“However, a failure to act with clarity of purpose and political will retards progress on the front of much-needed reform within International Financial Institutions if they are to be equal to the current challenges of member states and if we are not to perpetuate the discriminatory practices that result in undermining the transformational opportunities.”
Mottley said, “This is precisely why we are launching a third iteration of the Bridgetown Initiative, which identifies three key principles. First, we must change the rules of the international financial system and reform its governance and instruments.
“Secondly, we must shockproof vulnerable economies by dealing with debt and liquidity in a comprehensive, development-focused manner,” she said, adding, “Thirdly, we must augment financing by boosting country capacity to invest in resilience by several means, including the rechanneling of Special Drawing Rights through our multilateral development partners.
“Indeed, we must address the challenge of how we secure the global public commons and how we fund it. It is not only the climate crisis and loss of biodiversity but all of the other global challenges that we face,” Mottley said, noting that these considerations are of fundamental importance to the sustainable existence of future generations.
The Bridgetown Initiative was first released in 2022. It influenced the UN climate summit in Sharm-el-Sheikh and inspired the Summit for a New Global Financing Pact organized by French President Macron in Paris in June 2023.
The second version of the initiative was released at the UN climate summit in Bonn in June 2023 and looked like a merger with the SDG Stimulus Package being promoted by the United Nations. Barbados used the fourth International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS4) in May this year to roll out an updated version of the initiative.
Mottley, in her wide-ranging address to the global community, said that people have endured four years of poly-crises, continuing to wrestle with the climate crisis and the legacy of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“As a digitally connected people, we are confronted daily by multiple theaters of war and armed conflict. Citizens of every country struggle to contain the rising cost of living. And we are all now threatened by the second, but silent pandemic of Antimicrobial Resistance together with a growing incidence of death and disability from chronic noncommunicable diseases,” Mottley said.
She said if ever there was a time to pause and reset, it is now. Noting that “collectively, as an international community and individually, “we must now deliver new opportunities and solutions to these crises, which dampen economic growth, restrict the ambitions of our peoples, and numb our sense of the beauty and goodness the world has to offer.
“The reset for which I am calling, and, indeed, all our citizens are demanding, must see an end to all forms of discrimination. Today’s rules and institutions, which create first and second-class citizens depending on your nation of origin, militate against trust, credibility, and hope and foster a crisis of confidence in the existing international order, which must become inclusive and responsive for all.”
Mottley said that neo-colonialist structures, which reflect and perpetuate an old world order characterized by racism, classism, and misogyny while ignoring the legitimate aspirations of billions, will not help to foster hope or trust.
“We must ensure that global institutions give developing countries, tiny, vulnerable ones like my own, seats at the decision-making tables where we can be seen, heard, active agents in our cause, and lead our development paradigms. “
She reminded the global community that 2024 is the final year of the UN’s Decade for people of African Descent.
“Much has been achieved, but the “recognition, justice and development for people of African Descent,” promised by the Decade has, to say the least, not yet been fully realized. It is for this reason that Barbados and the Caribbean Community join the growing chorus for the immediate proclamation of a second decade to complete the unfinished work and address the matter of reparations for slavery and colonialism.
“This is a complex but necessary conversation. The Caribbean Community is committed to it. Its resolution lies in a multi-generational approach in the same way that the 20 million pounds sterling debt incurred for the compensation of enslaved person in the nineteenth century was only repaid in the twenty-first century – almost 200 years later,” Mottley said.
She said that of necessity, the reset must be characterized by institutional reform, which has to start at the United Nations.
“Councils which suggest that some are full members and others are only part-members, part-time, or occasional members, have no place in the 21st century. The anger and mistrust of our citizens in institutions, leaders, and multilateralism and its processes, which exclude, while yielding much talk and little action, is genuine. “
She said there are, however, glimpses of hope, noting that global leaders agreed on a Pact of the Future on Monday.
“We have agreed on a Global Digital Compact. We have agreed on a Declaration for Future Generations. All of this rests on the Common Agenda that the Secretary-General had set out,” she said, adding that agreement had also been reached on a political Declaration on Antimicrobial Resistance.
“Following on the intervention of the Bridgetown Initiative, and the Paris Pact for People and, the efforts of many, hope is also evident in the beginnings of reform of the international financial architecture,’ Mottley said, adding, “these are all important steps, but we cannot take our eyes off the prize.”
Mottely said that the SIDS Agenda is another story of promises made but not kept. She said that 30 years ago, the international community gathered in Barbados to take action for the first time on the unique challenges faced by small island developing states (SIDS).
“We birthed in my home country the first-ever global agenda for SIDS, which became known as the Barbados Programme of Action. I thank Mauritius for its Strategy of Implementation and Samoa for its Pathway as carriers of the baton of a development agenda for small island developing states.
“In the intervening years, in the face of multiple global crises from health to climate to finance, the vulnerabilities of SIDS have become more pronounced. In May this year, we gathered in Antigua and Barbuda for the fourth international conference on SIDS.
“I call on the international community and multilateral system to let us work together to ensure that the promise created in Bridgetown in 1994 is realized through delivery on the ABAS, the Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS 2024.”
Mottley also announced that Barbados has taken over the presidency of the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) (the V20 countries) from Ghana and that Bridgetown’s term priorities will be the multiple dimensions of climate change, the impact of climate change on human health, and the issue of debt and climate.
“I invite all climate-vulnerable United Nations Member States that still need to do so to join the other 70 countries in the CVF to strengthen our collective voice, enhance our efforts at advocacy, and address the climate crisis with urgency.
“I commend to you the Declaration of the Leaders of the Climate Vulnerable Forum, adopted on Wednesday, September 25, this week,” Mottley said, adding that a reset is needed to secure global peace above all else.
She said there are few areas where the world is more in need of the United Nations and our collective action than in the areas of peace and security. The conflicts that have engulfed Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar, Israel, Gaza, and now Lebanon are but the tip of an iceberg of death, violence, and instability.
She said even the longest war in history came to an end. These, too, will come to an end, but the question is at what costs and with how much loss of life, noting that innocent people are paying the price with their lives.
“Unless we address the root causes of these wars and how they are sustained, we will know more than we ever needed to know about war and the rumors of war.”
and then 