By Desmond Brown
Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Senator Jerome Walcott said his country Barbados — one of the Small Island Developing States (SIDS) — has been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We all recognize that the world has been struck by this global pandemic,” Walcott said Wednesday during the virtual launch of the United Nations’ COVID-19 Multi-sectoral Response Plan (MRP) and Fund Appeal.
“This group of countries in the Caribbean, small island developing states, we already face a number of challenges and it occurs almost at a time when it is too much to bear in terms of what we’re faced with daily and yearly.”
In April, leaders of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) held an extraordinary emergency meeting to analyse the situation in the region in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the time, Prime Minister Mia Mottley, who also chairs of the regional grouping, said: “The emergency will not end soon, so measures against the virus must be thought through for the long term.”
At Wednesday’s event Walcott reiterated the high economic impact that COVID-19 will have on SIDS.
“We have our fragile economies dependent primarily on tourism, which have been devastated by this pandemic, we have faced external economic shocks, I believe that some of us are facing in terms of the blacklisting coming from the EU as we try to create another niche for our economies,” Walcott said.
“We have indeed limited access to funding, we’ve been told that we’ve graduated to middle income level and we don’t qualify in terms of grant funding, we have limited fiscal space and indeed we face every year the [challenges] of climate change in the form of hurricanes, and so as we battle with all of these we are now faced with a pandemic situation, the pandemic of COVID-19.”
Walcott said SIDS are reeling under hardships already, with limited health-care resources and infrastructure.
He said the UN is too be praised for the effort it is making in recognizing the issues the small developing states in the Caribbean face.
Barbados and Eastern Caribbean countries will benefit from almost US$30 million under the initiative — part of the UN’s efforts to support countries in fostering international solidarity and helping to mobilize financial resources to meet some of their needs over the next eight months.
The initiative is aimed at supporting the ongoing advocacy by the Eastern Caribbean states for differential treatment based on their vulnerability and to support their access to more resources.
The MRP’s three main objectives are to contain the spread of COVID-19, minimize its social and economic impacts and ensure resilient recovery and to promote the protection and well-being of the most vulnerable.
During Wednesday’s launch, UN’s Resident Coordinator for Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean Didier Trecebq announced that up to US$7 million had already been garnered by the UN.
“I want to assure governments and people of the Eastern Caribbean that you have our full support … At this time of greater global uncertainty, the Caribbean has never before needed the level of assistance that it requires today,” Trecebq said.
“The region not only requires adequate fiscal space and resources to embark on a comprehensive socio-economic response to COVID; but it also needs technical expertise to effectively target the most vulnerable now, as well as in the longer-term as they seek to restore livelihoods and income security following this crisis.”
