BRIDGETOWN, Barbados, CMC—Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley told an international conference here that high crime rates, climate change, global health challenges, and restricted access to international development funding are vital factors preventing the region’s further socio-economic development.
Addressing the 16th Ministerial Forum for Development in Latin America and the Caribbean, which ends here on Friday, Mottley said that the crime situation in the region is worrying.
“It gives us no pleasure that Latin America and the Caribbean occupy virtually every spot in the top ten countries in the world with the highest per capita homicide rate,” Mottley said, adding, “There is no formal theatre of war in this hemisphere, but the scale of death from crime is unacceptable in almost every corner of the Americas.”
She acknowledged that the Caribbean has made significant progress in “reversing centuries of underdevelopment” over the past 50 years but that persistent poverty remained a critical challenge.
“We have lifted large numbers of our population out of poverty, but the fact that we still have an underbelly of poverty is what must drive us even further and harder than at any other time,” she said, noting that the global environment threatened to push many countries back into poverty just as they, “thought that they had turned the corner.”
Mottley said that multiple crises could “topple the state at any time,” whether from climate change and its impact on biodiversity or pandemics, all of which have the capacity to “destabilize nations and to send people back into poverty.”
She criticized the approach of international lending agencies, noting that access to development funding had worsened precisely when it was most needed.
“We have equally to fight this battle against all who believe that those who should have more and those who do not should not get it. That is a simple way of describing, regrettably, the last five decades, particularly, of how the world has approached the issue of fairness and equity in wealth creation and poverty eradication,” she said.
“That inequity has bred a level of distrust at worst and apathy at best at the very time when the world needs to be able to have its population globally helping in the fight against these crises that can all destabilize us.
“And if we thought we had difficulties with access to development funding, it has become worse because, at the very time that we need development funding for people, we equally need funding for adaptation and resilience building because the environment within which we are living is now equally a threat to our people’s capacity to survive,” she told the conference adding that despite these challenges, she remains optimistic.
“No matter how daunting these challenges seem, we are equal to the task, and our ability to recognize where the difficulties are will help us solve them…. We must be able to manage the diversity of challenges, or as we would say in simple language, we must be able to walk and talk, talk and chew and do multiple things.”
Delegations from more than 20 governments in Latin America and the Caribbean are participating in the two-day forum on how to accelerate and protect progress towards human development, social inclusion, and resilience.
The Barbados government is hosting the conference in collaboration with the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The organizers said the event is a critical step in addressing opportunities for building resilience and sustainability against future shocks to the region’s development.
The Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Achim Steiner, said the Caribbean and Latin America had common issues that negatively impacted their social development.
He told the conference that resilience was necessary, not only in terms of the environment but also as it relates to social issues.
“This is an era of disruption. We are seeing a world that is returning to conflict and competition and wars, with more people displaced, more refugees, more suffering than we have seen for decades,” he said.
“We are not at a glorious moment of sustainable development advancements and, therefore, this is a moment where [we must] reflect on what is going wrong and also where are the pathways for moving forward within each one of our country’s nations [and] communities.”
The meeting here builds on the discussions initiated at the XIII Ministerial Forum in Antigua and Barbuda in 2021, which discussed disasters and social protection systems in the context of protracted crises.
The expected outcome of the forum is a Ministerial Declaration that aims to be a roadmap for transformative policy action and impactful initiatives that transcend boundaries, ultimately steering the region toward a more equitable and resilient future.
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