Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, The Right Honourable David Milliband
Parliamentary Under Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs the Hon. Meg Munn
Distinguished Members of the UK Parliament
Colleague CARICOM Heads of Government and Foreign Ministers
Specially invited guests
Ladies and gentlemen!
It is indeed my pleasure and honour to address you on behalf of the Peoples and Governments of the Caribbean Community on the occasion of this, the Sixth UK – Caribbean Forum.
This Forum is taking place against the background of a number of changes since the last UK – Caribbean Forum which was held in April 2006 in Barbados under the theme, “Partnerships for Promoting and Sustaining Caribbean Development: Strategies for the Medium-and Long Term.”
Today, we meet at a time when there is new leadership and a new administration in the United Kingdom with new policy emphasis; new administrations in a number of CARICOM Member States, and with eight Foreign Ministers attending this Forum for the first time.
Foreign Secretary Miliband, you may recall that Heads of Government of CARICOM, including myself, met the Honourable Prime Minister Gordon Brown and yourself last year in the margins of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting held in Uganda. This encounter, while being a first for many of us, it is now an established tradition- an institution of sorts that dates back to 1998.
These fora testify to the continued commitment of the Caribbean and the United Kingdom to not merely maintain but continuously advance a long historical relationship, an important friendship, a constructive and mutually beneficial dialogue and partnership based on action and results.
Over the years, our dialogue has been circumscribed by celebratory and challenging national, regional and global realities. This year, the celebrations but also the challenges are greater. This year the Caribbean Community marks the thirty – fifth anniversary of its regional integration efforts.
The CSME – or CARICOM Single Market and Economy is the evidence of a process of maturing that began in 1973 with the signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas.
We have come a long way and undoubtedly have a long way to go, but we advance with hope, confidence and the well wishes of our friends, amongst them the UK and the EU.
However, at thirty-five, we are confronted with unprecedented challenges, many of them not spawned by the fifteen small, vulnerable but indomitable states that form our membership, but all of them direct threats to our very survival.
I speak of climate change, of security challenges, of rising energy and food prices, and of the socio-economic imbalances and instability that these threats engender.
Even as we meet on this British summer evening, the Caribbean is on guard- hurricane poised. This is not new. It is and always has been our lot by virtue of our geography and our size. Our seascapes and landscapes and our populations know hurricanes.
We accept and know our seas to be blue, and for some of us, our rivers to be brown, our vegetation lush, and our years divided into dry and rainy seasons even as we accept and know the seas to be stormy and our vegetation dry and our years to be divided between floods and hurricanes.
What is new to us is the unprecedented frequency and intensity of these natural disasters. What is new is how man’s activity-is now altering and pushing to extremes hitherto unknown, the natural phenomena we were once familiar with.
Hurricanes and floods now constitute more an irreverent act of man than an act of God. Everything is affected, potentially or in actuality. Climate Change is only too real to us though we contribute little to the phenomenon.
And then there are the other challenges, the ones we succeed in overcoming only to find ourselves compromised by our efforts – to achieve the millennium development goals by finding ourselves disqualified from access to concessionary financing and development assistance, which are vital to implementation, because we are now deemed to be middle income rather than poor countries.
There are other challenges that we share with our development partners. Combating the drug trade and its concomitant social ills, handling rising costs of fuel that compromise the ability of our industries to compete in a globalize world, a widening digital divide, rising costs of food, growing poverty and disease, brain drain and xenophobia are just a few of the many challenges we face.
We believe that these are challenges that we can overcome if we operate under the guiding principles of solidarity and cooperation and the shared objective of improving the quality of life of our peoples, through human resource development, the implementation of solid sustainable development policies, investment in innovation and research and of course, tolerance.
We believe, that the Economic Partnership Agreement that is expected to be signed between CARIFORUM Countries and the European Union at the end of this month provides both challenges and opportunities. We are counting on our friends such as the United Kingdom – to assist us in minimizing the challenges so that we could take full advantage of any opportunities offered by this agreement. Indeed, we expect to have fruitful discussions on just this issue during Session 5 of this Forum.
Our partnership with the UK on security has already yielded much results particularly in relation to the arrangements for the Cricket World Cup (CWC) which the Caribbean was proud to host in 2007. We expect our discussions on future cooperation between CARICOM and the UK in the area of security to yield similar positive results.
Foreign Secretary, distinguished guests, colleagues, this is a new Forum, let it be recalled as being one marked by new impetus to the UK Caribbean relationship, new initiatives and a stronger and better partnership.
May God bless the peoples of the United Kingdom and the Caribbean.
Thank You.
