BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, CMC – Prime Minister Mia Mottley is to visit France “in a few days” for talks with President Emmanuel Macron, a senior government minister has announced.
Foreign Affairs Minister Kerrie Symmonds announced in Parliament during the debate on the 2023-24 Estimates that he would accompany her to Paris.
Symmonds said that President Macron has “urged” that he be allowed to form part of a cooperative agreement with Barbados so that there can be a summit enabling him to use his global reach as a G7 leader to help the Caribbean island advance the Bridgetown Initiative.
The Bridgetown Initiative proposes to reform the world of development finance, mainly how rich countries help developing countries cope with and adapt to climate change.
Barbados sets out three critical steps in the Bridgetown Initiative. The first involves changing some terms around how funding is loaned and repaid. The aim is to stop developing nations from spiraling into a debt crisis when successive disasters like floods, droughts, and storms force their borrowing.
“By no stretch of the imagination could we have envisaged that this type of relationship would have been fostered for this country ten years ago,” Symmonds told legislators.
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