A week or so ago, Caricom’s Secretary-General, Irwin LaRocque, made clear that if the Caribbean is ever to be able to respond sustainably to the devastation caused by climate change, the eligibility criteria for development assistance must change.
Speaking about this in Georgetown on the occasion of the accreditation of a new Austrian Ambassador to Caricom, Ambassador LaRoque observed that the regional institution had long advocated that access to development funds should not be based on the “grossly inadequate and inaccurate criterion” of GDP per capita. It was, he said, an approach that had resulted in the graduation of most Caricom countries from accessing concessional financing.
“We believe that this, as applied to Small Island Developing States (SIDS), must be changed as a matter of urgency to include the concept of vulnerability,” he remarked, before going on to urge Caricom’s third country partners to lend strong support to its efforts to effect this change. There was too, he suggested, an urgent need for international development partners to re-examine the criteria for access to resources such as the Green Climate Fund.
Ambassador LaRoque’s remarks
