BRUSSELS, CMC- Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders will hold discussions with their European counterparts here on Monday, senior EU officials confirmed Friday.
The officials briefing reporters on the two-day EU and the Community of Latin American and the Caribbean States (CELAC) summit that begins here said that the deliberations will discuss several issues pertinent to the Caribbean region.
“It’s essential that we keep working with the region as the region presents itself to us,” the officials said, noting that matters such as the Bridgetown initiative, which Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley is spearheading, would also be an agenda item for the EU-CELAC summit.
The Bridgetown Initiative is being compared to the Marshall Plan of 1948 when the United States provided more than US$13 billion of foreign aid to help Western Europe recover after World War II.
Barbados has set 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.
Secondly, Barbados is asking development banks to lend an additional one trillion US dollars to developing countries for climate change resilience, including discounted lending focused on building climate resilience in climate-vulnerable countries.
The third step in the Bridgetown Initiative is to set up a new mechanism – with private-sector backing – to fund climate mitigation and reconstruction after a climate disaster.
The two-day EU-CELAC summit, the first in eight years, will be co-chaired by the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, who is the pro-tempore Presidency of CELAC.
The officials said that the issue of reparation for slavery will most likely be an agenda item.
“We have 60 states that are all signatories of the Durban Declaration with a bit of diplomatic imagination, a solution which recognizes this untold suffering is not an impossible ask, and I am confident that will not be a stumbling block,” one EU official told the news briefing.
“I think the Durban Declaration also has language in it which notes that some stages have both apologized for their actions and paid reparations for the suffering caused. So I think this is one of the points where there are still some reflections going on as to how best to capture the spirit of the language of the Durban Declaration that is being ratified by all 60 member states”.
The EU officials regard the summit as a “translation into practical actions of our political commitment to step up our sectoral cooperation with our Latin American and Caribbean partners.”
They said it is also to “leverage direct investment in various areas including the green and digital transition, transport, energy infrastructure, health, education, and skills, and the leaders will also profit from having a discussion on our trade relationship and what we can do to strengthen our network of trade agreements further.”
They said that “global Gateways” will be one of the deliverables from the summit, with the EU doubling its funding to US$10 billion.
“We will see more announcements on Monday; member states are coming forward, and others are probably keeping their cards close to their chests. We will be unveiling 108 projects in total for the entire region, and what we have been doing over the last weeks and months is to work with individual countries to identify priority areas….”
The officials said trade agreements have already been reached with 27 of the 33 CELAC member states.
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