One of the Caribbean’s longest-serving politicians, former Barbados Deputy Prime Minister Mia Mottley has told a Carib-bean Export Development (Caribbean Export) business forum in Kingston, Jamaica that the region now needs a new “development vision to replace the now outdated ones that we have gone through over the past half a century.”
Asserting that there is now a need for a new blueprint to guide regional export growth and enrichment, Mottley told the gathering of mostly regional businessmen that the Caribbean had gone through “all kinds of experiments over the past 50 years spanning industrialization, import substitution, opportunities that balance the desire to bring people out of poverty, but constrained by old structures of production and in more recent times the neo-liberal vision that has rendered us susceptible to the dilution of local and empowerment enfranchisement through foreign capital and foreign investment being the primary mechanism, through which production is obtained in our countries.”
Well known for her outspokenness on domestic and regional social, economic and political issues, Mottley told the forum that while the old “experiments” had realized some gains by modernizing some facets of Caribbean society and lifting some people out of poverty they had
