PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, CMC—Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley said Thursday he will travel to Barbados to join “certain” regional leaders for a weekend meeting with a high-level United States delegation.
At a news conference, Rowley told reporters that the meeting would be with “some decision-makers, high-ranking members of the United States government, which is currently in transition.
‘We have several issues on the table, not the least of which is the Bridgetown Initiative. We have been fighting with the Bretton institutions to treat us fairly in these difficult times and get terms and conditions…for our countries,” he said.
The Bridgetown Initiative is a call for urgent and decisive action to reform the international financial architecture (IFA), which was designed when most of the current member states were not independent and when climate risks or social inequalities, including gender equality, were not considered pre-eminent development challenges.
The small island developing states (SIDS), including those in the Caribbean, have become increasingly at odds with the reality and needs of the world today, making the IFA entirely unfit for purpose in a world characterized by unrelenting climate change, increasing systemic risks, extreme inequality, highly integrated financial markets vulnerable to cross-border contagion, and dramatic demographics, technological, economic, and geopolitical changes.
The Bridgetown Initiative is named for the capital city of Barbados, where it originated. While Barbados continues to play a leading role, it is not an initiative of Barbados alone but rather a coalition of partners in a movement for global change.
Rowley told reporters that this approach is being led by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, the leader of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), who has the lead responsibility for it.
‘I have been involved with it, being to Washington on more than one occasion. The US delegation has been to the Caribbean. We thought we had made some progress, but it has been crystalizing on something called the Bridgetown Initiative, which we need to defend and grow and advance the US authorities and the international financial bodies,” Rowley said.
“Therefore, we will meet in Barbados from Friday afternoon,” he said, adding, “We cannot but be engaged in these issues. “They have far-reaching consequences,” he said.
Rowley did not name the other regional leaders expected at the meeting with the US officials or whether these officials are from the outgoing Biden administration or the incoming team of President-Elect Donald Trump.
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