High-level SIDS Ministerial Dialogue: Key Challenges and Opportunities

Global supply chain forum addresses challenges of small island developing states

The Global Supply Chain Forum, aimed at addressing the transport and logistical challenges of Small Island Developing States (SIDS), brought together ministers and private sector representatives to discuss strategies for enhancing efficiency, sustainability, and resilience within their supply chains. The forum’s dialogue highlighted the shared experiences of SIDS, particularly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change, and culminated in the launch of a Ministerial Statement to be presented at the UN SIDS4 conference.

**Key Points from the Dialogue:**

1. **Economic Impact of COVID-19:** The pandemic’s disruption to global supply chains led to significant economic downturns in SIDS, with tourism-dependent economies like those in the CARICOM region experiencing sharp declines in GDP. The ministers from Fiji and the Marshall Islands emphasized the critical dependence on shipping for essential goods and the heightened costs due to their remote locations.

2. **Policy Interventions:** Governments across SIDS implemented measures to mitigate the economic impact of the pandemic and other crises. Barbados, for instance, capped fuel prices and collaborated with the private sector to limit price markups on essential goods. Guyana focused on agricultural development to reduce import bills, while Seychelles prioritized vaccination to reboot its tourism industry.

3. **Sustainability and Climate Change:** The existential threat of climate change to SIDS was a recurring concern, with the Marshall Islands minister detailing the impact of sea-level rise on infrastructure. Fiji’s Deputy Secretary discussed the country’s focus on decarbonisation policies and green shipping initiatives.

4. **Private Sector Perspective:** Jeffrey Hall from the CARICOM Private Sector Organization highlighted the importance of cargo volume in attracting shipping services and the potential for regional hubs. He advocated for policy frameworks that facilitate regional trade and reconsolidation, noting the correlation between port size and ease of doing business.

5. **Access to Finance:** Ministers from Seychelles and Tuvalu criticized the use of GDP per capita as a measure for accessing concessional financing, advocating for a multidimensional vulnerability index that better reflects the challenges faced by SIDS.

6. **Regional Collaboration:** The significance of regional cooperation was emphasized, with Curaçao’s Minister Cooper proposing regional warehouses and shared strategies to enhance supply chain stability in the Caribbean.

7. **Global Economic Order:** Tuvalu’s Minister Kofe called for a value-based approach to international trade, focusing on collective well-being and responsibilities, and emphasized the urgency of global climate action.

**Conclusion and Observations:**

The forum concluded with the launch of the Ministerial Statement for Enhancing Transport and Logistics in SIDS, representing a collective commitment to addressing the unique challenges of SIDS in the global supply chain. Observations included the resilience of SIDS governments in supporting their populations during the pandemic and the private sector’s call for moral considerations in global trade practices. The discussions underscored the interconnectedness of global challenges, the disproportionate impact on SIDS, and the need for an equitable and responsible global economic system. The forum highlighted the critical role of international cooperation, sustainable development, and innovative solutions in building resilient SIDS economies.

Moderator:
Thank you. Thank you once again, ladies and gentlemen. Good afternoon to you. We will continue now with our sessions for the Global Supply Chain Forum. The objective of this next high-level dialogue is to engage in a constructive and forward-looking dialogue to address the unique transport and logistical challenges, fostering collaboration and formulating practical, actionable solutions to boost efficiency, sustainability and resilience. I’d like to call to the stage, please, the Deputy Secretary for the Ministry of Public Works, Meteorological Services and Transport in Fiji, Mr. George Tavo. Please come to the stage. I’d also like to welcome the Minister of Transport, Energy, Communication and Innovation, Tuvalu, Mr. Simon Kofi. Please help me welcome Marshall Islands Minister of Transportation, Communication and Information Technology, Mr. Hilton Kendall. Next from Seashells, Anthony DeJox, the Minister for Transport. Guyana’s Minister of Public Works, Mr. Juan Edgel. From the Bahamas, the Minister of Energy and Transport, Ms. Jo Beth Lillian Colby Davis. Heading over now to Curacao, please help me welcome Minister of Transport and Urban Planning, Mr. Charles Cooper. And we saw him earlier today, let’s ask him to come back to the stage now, Barbados’ Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, the Honorable Kerry Simmons. We had the opportunity offstage to welcome him back home. Ladies and gentlemen, moderating this session is Barbados’ Ambassador Matthew Wilson, permanent representative to the UN World Trade Organization and other international organizations in Geneva, your moderator, Mr. Matthew Wilson. The floor is yours.

Matthew Wilson:
Well, good afternoon, everyone. I hope that you’ve had a good lunch and that you’re all energized for this incredible discussion that we will have with this equally incredible panel. Now, I know it’s tradition that we usually give applause at the end of a panel. But I want to give applause at the beginning of this panel because we have a number of ministers here. Aha! Now we have forgotten our representative from Martinique. And this makes me really happy because I’m an international gender champion in Geneva and I’m not supposed to sit on panels where there’s no women. So I was really concerned I was losing my credentials. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you. So like I said, I want to give, I want all of you to give a round of applause to this panel because we have ministers here today who have come a long, long, long way to get here to be with us. We have ministers from Fiji, Tuvalu, Marshall Islands for example, who have literally taken over 30 hours to get here, traveling a distance of around 13,928 kilometers, which is the equivalent of driving around Barbados 140 times. So ministers, thank you for being here and a round of applause. So as Bell said, my name is Matthew Wilson. I’m the ambassador of Barbados in Geneva, the ambassador to the United Nations and to the World Trade Organization. And it really is an honor to moderate this incredible panel that will look at the challenges and the opportunities that small island developing countries face. And I anticipate that we’re going to have an incredible amount of similarities because whether you are in the Caribbean or you’re in the Indian Ocean or in the Pacific Ocean, because we have the same characteristics, we will have many of the same challenges. But I also hope that we will also be able to share some of the scalable and replicable solutions. And the main outcome of today’s meeting is going to be a SIDS Ministers of Transport ministerial statement, which has been worked on and endorsed by SIDS all over the world. and it will feed into the UN SIDS4 conference next week in Antigua. So first I would like to give the floor to my minister, my boss, Minister Kerry Simmons, the Senior Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, to say a few words as he needs to leave us briefly for some official duties, and then he will return at the end. So Minister, my question for you is this. Drawing from Barbados’ unique experience as a small island state, what are some of the specific challenges that Barbados has faced in transport and logistics, particularly in light of the recent crises and the disruptions, and how have these challenges, and you spoke about it earlier, actually impacted the day-to-day lives of citizens? Over to you, Minister.

Kerrie Symmonds:
Thank you very much, Matthew. And let me begin as chairman of the Barbados side of the planning of this meeting by apologizing to all of you for the terrible gender imbalance on this panel. That certainly escaped my eye as well. Coming straight to the question at hand, I want to say that the disruption, and perhaps it was triggered primarily at first instance by COVID, was very severe. And I indicated a few minutes ago, a few hours ago when I spoke, that for the travel-dependent countries of CARICOM, all of our gross domestic product percentages would have fallen by double digits during the period of time of the pandemic. So that, for example, in Barbados’ case, we would have experienced a double-digit decline somewhere in the vicinity of 15%, I can’t remember off the top of my head all of the other CARICOM states, but for most of us it would have been between 14% decline and 20-21% decline of GDP during the course of the pandemic. That is a substantial degree of disruption. For the commodity side of trade, it was again a difficulty for us because I think the major problem that we would have felt in Barbados was a very sharp escalation in the cost of living. That is a two-fold problem. One, our traditional suppliers would have been unable to source product from those places where traditionally they had done business. I think it has been an eye-opening experience because almost to, without exception, there is now an effort to build greater resilience in your supply chain by finding alternative places from where you can source product, which was a problem that we did not necessarily embrace prior to the pandemic experience. I think making that situation more difficult for us was the exceptionally high increase in the cost of container freights, freight containers. Those containers were stranded either in Europe or in China, depending on where the shutdown took place, but we had containers on one side of the world and goods on the other side of the world. To access the necessary containers to do the freighting came at a great price. In some cases, in Barbados’ case, 500 to 600 percent more than what the ordinary cost would have been. That, of course, has a… substantial knock-on effect for all of our consumers here. Now, I think, Matthew, part of your question was, how then did we try to adjust to deal with some of these things? And this is where I think the government’s policy was to try to intervene in the marketplace. And let me just say to you that it is not just commodities trade that we were impacted by. We are a fossil-fuel driven economy which is trying to make its transition towards renewable energy. So that for the vast majority of our homes, offices, business places, etc., we still rely on the fossil-fuel importation. And that too sustained price increases that were dramatic. And they were compounded, of course, by some of the difficulties that took place and are taking place in the Ukraine and so on. So that the cost of energy was a major issue for us. We intervened at the pump by way of placing a cap on the price of diesel and on the price of gasoline imported into the country, and government absorbed the difference. For a country in an IMF program, that is a difficult thing to do. But believe you me, if we did not do that thing, it would have been, I suspect, the cause of tremendous unrest. And I believe it is true to say that several other governments, perhaps to a lesser extent, did a similar thing in the Eastern Caribbean. We also intervened in terms of the households, where we would have again placed a cap on the cost of energy that up to a certain percentage of use in every household. And in a similar way, we would have then had to find a way of working with our private sector, so as to try to find a balance between the increasing costs that there are. facing in terms of bringing goods into the island and of course the need for them then to place their own markups and when they sell to consumers. We did have a successful, I believe it was a successful, compact between our private sector and government and our labour movement where it was accepted that a basket of goods which we all agreed on, some essential commodities, some of which would have been personal hygiene commodities, some of which would have been the essential proteins, some of which would have been other, you know, the more nutritious stuff that you have to eat, vegetables, fruits, etc. But that the agreement was that there would be a limit on the markup which was given by our private sector. So that even though from company to company, business place to business place, the markup will vary, there was an across-the-board understanding that for argument’s sake, if you were going to sell chicken, there was going to be no markup higher than 10%. And that worked in Barbados for about a year. And again, I want to use this opportunity to thank the people from the private sector in Barbados because it was that spirit of cooperation, all of us working together, that I think saved this country from what would have been almost certain instability as a result of the sharp price increases which we had to treat to in the context of the disruption in global supply. I trust that that answers your question.

Matthew Wilson:
Thank you. Thank you very much, Minister. And I know that you have to leave. We wish you good luck with your signing ceremony with UNIDO, and we look forward to welcoming you back at the end. But now I’m really very, very pleased to give the floor to Mr. Geoffrey Hall, who you would have heard speaking earlier. of the CARICOM Private Sector Organization to, in a way, frame the discussions that we’re going to have today from the private sector perspective, and to look at the challenges and opportunities that exist in the supply chains, including in the region, for the private sector. So, Mr. Hull, please come up to the lectern.

Jeffrey Hall:
Thank you very much, Ambassador Wilson and Ministers present. Today, I am representing the CARICOM Private Sector Organization, or CPSO. And the CPSO, for those who may not know, is a new institution. It was established in 2020 by a bold decision of the heads of government of CARICOM to bring the voice of regional business into the policy arena, and in fact, onto the playing field as we work towards the full achievement of our Caribbean regional integration. So the first order of business for me today is to thank you for the opportunity to be here and to present some Caribbean private sector ideas. The second order of business today is for me to declare interest. Today I represent the diverse interests of the CPSO, but my perspective is to some extent influenced by my own role in Caribbean business. The businesses that I lead have significant interests in services, but we also produce and trade tangible goods with important businesses in property and infrastructure development, farming, consumer goods manufacturing, right here in CARICOM. But our businesses that I think matter to this discussion. are our port and shipping operations. We operate Kingston Wharves, a multipurpose terminal, a gateway port with direct links between Asia, Europe, North and South America, and about 27 countries in the region, and Geest Line, with the image present, a shipping line that connects two ports in Europe with ten ports in the Caribbean, and of course we do warehouses and cargo consolidation. So with that, I want to use the remainder of my time to briefly lay out a series of premises. They are intended to be fact-based statements, not controversial. The theory is if you accept the premises, that we might align on a conclusion, and that would of course be in the hands of the policy makers who will speak. So the first premise, premise number one, is that to survive as small states, we have to trade. I don’t think that anybody here thinks that our states can simply pass a law to command that semiconductor technology of the future be produced here, or that we can slap a massive duty, a prohibitive duty on foreign cars to ensure that they’re made here. We know we have to trade. To be clear, and this was mentioned earlier by our colleague from Central America, I can imagine a very successful small state that only sells services, but I cannot imagine a successful small state that doesn’t buy goods. The second premise, the second premise is that ships, maritime transportation will go to where the volume is. So barring war. or sanctions or some kind of hyper-regulation, ships will go where the volume is and make themselves available to move it. So put simply, in general, there are enough ships to go around. And if there aren’t, we’re given time horizon, people will build them. So premise number two notes that oftentimes we in small island states conflate a shipping problem with what is in fact a cargo problem. This conundrum is nowhere near as complex as that of the chicken and the egg. In this business, the cargo volume must come first, then comes the shipping. So the view of the CPSO, of the private sector, is that shipping capacity is available to the small states of the Caribbean, but the required cargo volume isn’t. Premise number three, it’s a little bit less demoralizing. Small states need to know that there need not be a correlation between the size of the land or the size of the population and the size of the volume that goes through a port. Panama, Jamaica, Singapore, Dubai, Bahamas, these are all small countries, relatively small countries, with relatively large global ports. So in those cases, the volume of cargo that goes through the ports is 10 times the amount required to service the domestic populations. Their job is to receive cargo from lots of places and send it back out to where it needs to go. And guess what? The need for hubs like these is not going away. In fact, the drive for bigger ships requiring deeper drafts, bigger cranes, more invested terminals, the shift towards emission standards requiring new fuel options. slower steaming, all give a temptation to bypass the milk run of deviations to smaller ports. All make it more likely that new variations on the hubs, new hubs will come to exist and will urgently to exist in regions with a proliferation of small states like this one. Premise number four, two more to go. So there’s no correlation between the size of the country necessarily and the size of the port. But there is a definite, unambiguous and significant correlation between the size of the port and the ease of doing business. The ability to move goods in and out easily without unnecessary taxation and with harmonious regulation will determine the size of the port. Now CARICOM and the CSME were clearly designed to allow goods to move within the region if they were made within the region as determined by a change in HS code. So those goods can move freely from one point to another in the region. So we’re off to a good start. The problem though is that nine times more container volumes come to us from outside the region than from within it. And unfortunately the SIDS of CARICOM do not have a policy design that will easily allow goods that emanate from outside the region to be deconsolidated, warehoused, tweaked, restyled, combined with other local inputs maybe, repackaged, relabeled and reconsolidated to move about within the region and beyond. And the absence of these rules means that we’re denying ourselves the opportunity which is much, much, much bigger than the one we have created. It is the opportunity to grow. shipping and logistics ecosystem of cargo volumes that is linked to nearshore logistics and to value-added activities for finished and intermediate goods that can compete and serve our region and beyond. So we’re talking about free zones and special economic zones and those can play an important bridging role but ultimately shipping volumes around the Caribbean will grow and they get a wider ecosystem of shipping volumes and maritime activity and investment if the import duty into CARICOM does not have to be paid and repaid on the same good. The fifth premise. This is the last one. So there’s no correlation between the size of the port and the size of the state but there is a correlation between the size of the port and the size of the capital needed to pull it off. A big port requires big money and highly incentivized big money and big money that chases throughput and productivity and oftentimes this big money is bigger and more skilled and more specialized and more connected and networked than that which a small state can easily afford. So there’s an opportunity to attract private capital that’s missing in many of our states. Private capital can help to do the business of developing logistics hubs and small states like ours have to figure out how to get comfortable with these players, how to deal with them, understand their motivations and their constraints and this is the secret. This is what Jamaica and Bahamas and Panama and the Dominican Republic and other states are doing. So these are the premises. from which I think we can draw some constructive solutions as a team. In short, we have to create hubs where goods can arrive in volume and then move around easily from there, and in so doing, create and drive the volume that becomes the basis for an integrated transportation system, one that can in turn facilitate production and value-added activity. But we’ve got to harvest new policy frameworks and global capital to do it. In my view, what I’ve said for goods is also a natural starting point, I think, for thinking about passengers. They’re not easy questions. I don’t want to make light of it. They’re difficult trade-offs. But we in the private sector, in the CPSO, think the project on which we’ve all embarked today is definitely worth the effort. Thank you.

Matthew Wilson:
Thank you. Thank you very, very much, Mr. Hall, for really injecting the private sector perspective and a really important dose of reality. And if I take some of the key things from what you said, trade is a non-negotiable for small states. Ships follow the volume. It’s a cargo problem, not a shipping capacity problem. What matters is not the size of the country, it is the attractiveness of the port that makes it draw traders. Ease of business is fundamental. Predictability and transparency matters. Regional trade and reconsolidation is underexploited. Capital and financing is key to build ports that people will come to, but access to private capital is challenging. So thank you very much, Mr. Hall. So now I’m going to turn back to the ministers. I’m going to come to you first, Minister Charles Cooper, Minister of Transport and Urban Planning of Curacao. It’s a real pleasure to welcome you here, and as an aside, Barbados looks forward to working with you as Chair of the WTO Accession of Curacao to the World Trade Organization. So we look forward to working with you on that process, Minister. So the floor is yours. The same question that I asked to Minister Simmons. Thank you. Yes.

Charles Cooper:
Thank you. It’s an honor for me to represent Curacao today at this Global Supply Chain Forum, organized by UN Conference on Trade and Development, and also the government of Barbados. We came with a great group of people from Curacao, they are there. So seven people, so that is the importance that we put on this type of venues. Basically, we as SID also have been impacted by the disruption of the supply chain in various examples. The one which Minister Simon said, that is one, the COVID, of course, we all have suffered from that. But also Curacao has suffered from the sanctions from the United States on Venezuela. Because maybe 80% of all our foods, let’s say the fruits and vegetables, we import from Venezuela. So at the moment they imposed those sanctions on Venezuela, it was a disruption. And then we had to look for alternatives via Colombia. That was more expensive, of course, and then we established a route via Santo Domingo by ship, which nowadays is booming. So there was also an opportunity for that sanction in post that we got another route of getting the goods, at least the fruits and the vegetables for our fellow countrymen. The one impacted from Ukraine and also the Suez Canal, so we also got the butterfly effect of that in Curaçao, and indeed it drives the prices. But the one of COVID, I want to say that it had impacted, the prices went high, but we have to be also thankful we are, as Curaçao, part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. We are one of the four countries in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, and that helped because then the Netherlands have helped us with the credit line for paying the salaries for more than one year of everyone on Curaçao. So it was a loan that we have to pay within maybe the next 30 years, but still we have to be thankful that at the time of the crisis, they responded as brothers in the Kingdom. So that has to be said. Also we came to the conclusion that we have to… do something in our port, the way we trade, the way our port is being handled and managed, it is too outdated. We have to destabilize the whole system, because at the moment the way they’re doing it is causing a lot of demerge at the moment, and the demerge will be passed to the consumer, so it will increase the price at the end for the consumer. So that is something that we are looking into it, for detailing it, and make all the trade easier. So all the bottlenecks of the system is being analyzed at the moment in our port. Also we are stimulating the local production and consumption. We are more giving incentive for people to go into agriculture, hydroponics, the new ways of doing agriculture. Also livestock and fishery. Actually last week we just signed an MOU with a company which have to come, or will want to come explore fish farming in Curaçao. So that is also we signed an MOU that we will hear more about in the coming months and years. Also the behavior change is important, I think it’s for all of us. Actually we are importing more than we actually need, and you see it also when you travel. You think you need three pairs of shoes, and you only need maybe one or two. The same is with importing. I think we all are importing more than we actually use, and that is something that we are telling the people in Curaçao. We say less is more, so less is more, import the thing you really need. So that is also one thing. But that is locally. But then let’s go to the part of regional. Regional also we think that together we can do great together. And this venue is one that can be propeller for this type of changes. Because most of the time we think like, you know, island wise. And I think we have to start thinking together as it’s a great country. And we’re part of the great country. And then from then we make strategies to target the supply chain challenges and eliminate them step by step. And there is things that you can do. For example, sourcing from stable region. Why we’re going to import things all over from China? And we all are doing it separately. Why not one doing it, come with it in the region, and then from there in a warehouse maybe have a lot of places, a big free zone. Why we cannot use our free zone for having a great stock for the whole Caribbean? So those are the things I’ve been talking about regionally. But I think I won’t consume much more time, because I have other colleagues who have to also say their part. So we are thinking locally what we can do. Also regionally what we can do. We have some points that we can discuss together and reach Friday to a common ground on this. Thank you.

Matthew Wilson:
And I really applaud what Curacel has been doing the last couple of years in terms of trying to build closer relations with the CARICOM community. I know you’re building closer relations with Trinidad, you’ve approached the CARICOM Secretariat to regularize the relationship, and I think that’s really important. And the issue you mentioned about the need to improve the procedures at the port, especially to digitalize, I want to point out someone in the audience, and I’m a big believer in South-South cooperation, who you really should speak to, Patricia Francis from Jamaica, who if you want to know about how to improve trade facilitation procedures, this is the lady you should speak to. So please.

Charles Cooper:
Thank you for your effort that you are doing for us, as Curacel, to get a seat in the World Trade Organization. Thank you.

Matthew Wilson:
To turn the floor over to Mr. Juan Edgehill, Minister of Public Works of Guyana, a very warm welcome to you. A warm welcome to the country which has recorded the world’s highest real GDP growth in 2022 and 2023. So Minister, the floor is yours.

Juan Edghill:
Thank you very much, Mr. Moderator, and let me express thanks to both the UN Conference on Trade and Development and the government of Barbados for hosting us at this time. When we face challenges, we should not become daunted. Obviously, over the last five years, four or five years, if I’m to sit here this afternoon to discuss some of the challenges that we faced as a country, I might be evoking sympathy and empathy from you. We took government in the midst of COVID. We had two floods that could have wiped out more than 60% of GDP. We had tremendous challenges with a post-election period where the country was going nowhere. In the midst of all of that, you have to find the courage to turn things around. So heavily, we had to pay attention to policy formulation. Let’s deal first with what took place in the world as it relates to logistics. Really there was no shortage, but the problem was logistics and getting things from one place to the other. We faced the same challenge like every other country, I guess, here with the cost of shipping where it went up by 500%, 600%. What we did as a country to ensure that prices remained stable on the market, since duty was charged on cost, insurance, and freight, we worked with the private sector. And the freight charge that was used was the post-COVID freight charge. So we forego billions of dollars in revenue as a state to ensure that the private sector did not have to raise prices to compensate for the cost that they were paying for shipping. And that made a significant difference in the lives of people. The same thing happened with the cost for fuel because in the midst of all that was happening, we had the world fuel crisis. We also had a world food crisis. And the major challenges of the world today is to ensure that we have energy security, food security, and climate security. So we have to ensure that whatever we do in that context, we maintain a balance that we can have energy security, food security, and climate security. We also ensured a price at the pump for the user never went above the price that it was before the problem. We reduced the excise tax and then we brought it down to zero, then we brought it down to zero. And then to ensure that people did not have to pay excessive costs for electricity because in Guyana, that’s one of our major challenges right now, the cost per kilowatt of electricity. I think we’re the highest in the region and we are working to bring that down. We ensure that the cost that the consumer had to pay did not increase. The government absorbed that and of course that would have carried on to water supply because you need electricity to carry the water supply. So those were some of the initiatives that we put in place to manage that. But I also want to indicate that while that is happening, it was a time when Guyana’s need for imports grew because of the booming oil and gas sector. Supply chain management became a key and critical situation. As the minister who’s also responsible for the maritime affairs of the country, we saw movement of ships grew by 200% in just a short window of time. And the difficulty with that, because we are six feet below the sea, we have to maintain the draft because boats coming in need a required amount of draft and the desilting that is taking place as a result of how we are located was a major, major challenge. So we had to also deal with that. Now I am making this point to say that one, we had to take note of the reality that what is happening around the world, I mean with a lot of our Caribbean partners who come to Guyana for goods and supplies, including sand, we ensure that they were coming with aggregates that we needed to complement what we were blasting in the country to keep the construction sector going. We had to ensure that who coming for rice was also able to bring in other products so that we can be able to compensate to keep the cost of freight down and to ensure that our trade become more effective even in the time of crisis. One of the innovations that we applied in the midst of that crisis is that we brought a new level of direct cash transfers to families. We deliver $5,000 to every household during COVID. When people couldn’t come out, we went to them to ensure that they had money. Why? We had more than 3,000 small businesses that could have collapsed. Businesses that surrounded schools and places of entertainment, small businesses that provide services in the evening that collapsed because people couldn’t move. They still needed to eat. We had to deal with the banks to service and put monetary on how they deal with that. And I’m happy that right now in Guyana we have one of the smallest percentages of non-performing loans. We were able to bring ourselves out of that challenge. But more particularly in the Caribbean, with the Caribbean’s initiative of reducing the CARICOM import bill by 2025, by 25% by 2025, that we had to pay some very special important things to work. One, the biggest challenge to meat supply in the Caribbean is stock feed. So, we have to open up new lands to plant corn and soybeans, and I think we’re going to become a net exporter of feed and meat in a very short while. I think CARICOM is right now working on the transport logistics to be able to move food between countries. Barbados is opening up a terminal, Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados, and I think Suriname wants to come on board to get a ferry to move among bringing supplies here. But we also took note of the difficulty because we have said that our prosperity is a prosperity for the entire Caribbean. We don’t see Guyana’s prosperity as a prosperity for Guyana alone, it’s a prosperity for the entire Caribbean. And we realize that one of the challenges that the Caribbean islands are having is the supply to the cruise ships that come to the Caribbean. Every time the cruise ships go on the local market to buy, the price for the locals in the Caribbean would also go up. So we went into our agriculture providing high volume and high price goods that are required through shade house agriculture. So we’ve had to move from regular plantation agriculture to shade house agriculture, which has made a significant difference. I think a number of the Caribbean states have come to Guyana to benefit from that. The problem now is ensuring that we get those products to the market in a timely manner, ensuring we have the airlift as well as the logistics in terms of shipping. The challenges still remain and I’m sure none of us in this room could predict if there’s another war, there’s another crisis that developed, and Guyana’s had its own crisis with our neighbors to the west putting us under tremendous pressure with the military buildup and a claim to almost two-thirds of our country. So we’ve had to deal with that in the context of everything else that is happening. But the one thing I want to say, what we have done is not because we are great. What we have done is because we did it in partnership with our brothers and sisters in the Caribbean. And there was a constant engagement of CARICOM on these matters. And that is something that I would really want to recommend here. We are too small to survive on our own. We are better when we do it together. Thank you for now, sir.

Matthew Wilson:
Thank you, Minister. I mean, you are a true regionalist. And I think that that is so, so important. And some of the issues that you just mentioned, I am excited to see where things are going to go in the Caribbean in the next three to four years. With the improved regional transportation system, with the hubs for food and agriculture. So I think all I would say to the non-Caribbean people in the room today is watch this space. Some really exciting things are going to happen in the region with the leadership of countries like Guyana. Now we are going to turn to the Minister for Transport of Seychelles, Mr. Antony Derjacques. Now, Seychelles is another SIDS piloting really innovative tools through, for example, the launch of the Seychelles SDG investor map, which serves to attract private capital to investment opportunities aligned with the SDGs, something that was said earlier about attracting private capital. So the floor is yours, sir, to understand a little bit more about the Seychelles reality.

Antony Derjacques:
Thank you. Good afternoon. Thank you first to UNCTAD for the invitation, Madam Secretary General. And thank you to the government of Barbados and the Prime Minister. Like all other SIDs, small island developing states, we face the same problems. I do not wish to labor on those problems because they’re so similar and from now until Friday we’ll be acquainted with the problems. They are common. Seychelles is a small island state in the Western Indian Ocean. We have 115 islands scattered over 1.3 million square kilometers of EEZ. Our population is only a hundred thousand. So we have the common problems with shipping. We have a concentrated economy which is 57% tourism, then financial services and commercial fishing which is based on tuna. We have one of the largest tuna canning factories in the world in Seychelles. We are also a high-income country. So for our purpose I wish to just mention that from our perspective looking at middle-income SIDs and high-income SIDs there is a specific problem in that we do not have access to concessionary funding for development as other developing states. At this point in time when you look at the questions is what can the multilateral organizations do? I think that looking and grading countries on GDP per capita or GNI, gross national income, is singular and does not take into account the vulnerabilities of small island states. We don’t only face a problem of transportation but we have a very low population and therefore market. We are very, very far from major centers, like Seychelles is 1,000 miles from anywhere. Our nearest neighbor is Kenya, which is approximately 1,100 kilometers to the west. We are extremely isolated. But with an MVI, Multidimensional Vulnerability Index, our specificities can be taken into account. That is, we are open and prone to shocks, like COVID. We went through the same experience. With COVID, Seychelles shut down. And no tourists arrived in the country for at least a year. So governments, similarly, paid the wages of every single worker in Seychelles for slightly more than a year. We didn’t have the Netherlands to help us. So we did it through our own efforts, through our own economy. And when we took over government in 2020, in October, there was practically nothing in the central bank. We only had some, and we had to borrow from our own central bank and pay back as a government. But one year through COVID, we got through our friendship, for example, with the UAE, sufficient vaccination, and also from India, sufficient vaccination. And we became, together with Abu Dhabi and the UAE and Israel, one of the fastest vaccinated countries in the world. So we could open our economy. Our policy was to try as fast as possible to open our economy and then to create a bubble, a bubble from other states that were similarly vaccinated, like the UAE and Israel. and they went to Rwanda, in Central Africa, and to the Seychelles. So, our arrivals from tourism skyrocketed because our country was safe as being fully vaccinated. For cost of living, we worked hard on inflation. We created a basket of goods which were subsidized, and our social welfare index went up by 32%. So, it took us about a year to hit again the arrival figures of tourism as compared to 2019, which was the highest in our history. So, this is how we tried, and we recovered from COVID. Now, at this point in time, we are fully recovered. Seychelles faces the same transportation problems in that we are not on the obvious shipping lanes. So, vessels bypass the Seychelles, and our goods often are deposited either in Durban or in Mauritius. And then we have smaller feeder vessels that pick up containers and bring them back to Seychelles. Huge vessels, like the speakers previous reminded us, that the vessels are getting bigger and slower. So, the large vessels are interested in depositing 4,000, 5,000 containers in Durban and not coming into our waters for 300 containers. It’s not worth their while. Also, our infrastructure, for example, our port and airport, was built by the British just before independence in 1974. So, what I’ve done, I’ve worked hard with my ministry and the port authorities, and we now have issued letters of interest for a tender. So, we intend to start the construction of a modern port. Without a modern port, without onshore cranes, vessels will not stop. And vessels with cranes are outmoded and are not being built. So you have to create the infrastructure to attract shipping also, and this is what we intend to do. So that the layover is very short, the infrastructure is there, and in any case, the port was outdated. For the airport, we have almost completed our master plan. Small island developing states face major problems for these infrastructure projects. The cost per unit remains the same. For example, for dredging, it’s the same per square meter. For a port of 1,000 meters, or one for 400 meters, to build a quay is the same. And for the airport, when you build a terminal, it’s the same $3,000 to $4,500 dollars, American dollars, per square meter of a terminal. So with a small population of 100,000 looking at major projects, it becomes huge capital that is involved. And this is the issue with small island developing states. They are especially vulnerable because of the shipping issues. They are especially vulnerable because of climate change. You all have coral bleaching, which affects tourism. You all have coastal erosion, which takes away the coast and the beaches. You all have road infrastructure erosion, which necessitates the rebuilding at a different area and a different height. of your roads. So at the same time that we face these huge problems, the development funds are being repurposed elsewhere because we’ve reached a high income state. So it’s as if because you’ve reached a point of success, you’re now not allowed to go further, you must regress. That’s because the formula is wrong. It’s based on a pure economic factor, which is GDP per capita, or what we call it GNI. Whereas with the multidimensional vulnerability index, you take into account all the factors which affect SIDs and the developing states, which are not getting the concessionary funding. It is being done, and it shows that more and more SIDs have to come together to tackle this issue. This is an issue in common. We cannot build ports, roads, development, education, health for our people if concessionary funding dries up. So my message from this conference at the end of the day is to look at the mode of funding for our states. I thank you very much.

Matthew Wilson:
Excellent, and I’d like to just point out something that I’ve realized here, just listening to all of you. Not only do we all share similar stories, but do you realize that every single small island developing state that has spoken here has said that during the pandemic, they did everything in their power to make sure that their population stayed afloat. that their population could still have an income, that their population was still productive, that their SMEs still survived. That says a lot about the nature of governance and governments in small island developing states. And I wanna pick up on that last thing you just said about being able to access finance. And I would like the audience to do something for me. I would like you to repeat loudly after me, GDP per capita does not work. Louder, I want them to hear it up in New World Bank. Perfect, thank you. So now I’m really, really quite happy to turn to Mr. Hilton Kendall, the Minister of Transportation, Communication, and Information Technology of the Marshall Islands. Now, the Marshall Islands, if you don’t know, it spans 29 coral atolls with coral rims that encircle a lagoon, five single islands over a total land area of just 70 square miles, which faces all of the climate-related supply chain disruptions that you can think of. So Minister, the floor is yours.

Hilton Kendall:
Thank you, Mr. Moderator. And I would also like to thank the organizers for putting this event together. Before I go on and give you my answers on the question that came up, I would like to say on behalf of the people of the Marshall Islands and Her Excellency, President Hilda C. Ayane, I would like to say thank you very much and give you warm greetings from the Marshall Islands. I’m really sorry I’m gonna hide my team right down what I’m gonna say today because you know given the flight from the Marshall Islands down here me I’ve been slept by we got in last night at 11 o’clock and I couldn’t I just can’t sleep it’s it’s always like this first time I go to a new place and Barbados is a very nice place and I like to on behalf of the people of the Marshall Islands say thank you to everybody and thank you to the Barbados government for hosting this special event for the small islands development states which is a very important event for us to get together and try to solve the problems that we we encounter as different countries I know we have heard from Curacao, Seychelles and Guyana, we still got Tuvalu and Fiji but so without further ado I’m gonna read from the paper I’m the new guy on the block but anyways the Marshall Islands has to contend with climate change and extreme weather events and the Marshall Islands has vast expanse of atolls scattered over a large area of ocean this makes it we all we are also very remote our islands are at the end of the maritime routes this makes importation very costly it takes a long time for crucial goods and energy to arrive at our islands for us shipping is a lifeline and it is currently the only effective way of transporting goods. We import all our fuel, most foodstuffs, and all basic goods via shipping. We also have very fragile trade links. COVID taught us we could survive without airline services. It was difficult and came at a huge financial cost and disruption to our society, but we survived. However, we cannot survive without access to international shipping. The fragility of those trade links are compounded by climate change with an increasing frequency of extreme weather events. In addition to the impacts we already face, the outlook of further climate change impacts on our supply chain is particularly bleak. Since 1993, the surrounding ocean has risen by more than 12 centimeters. Today, it regularly floods some neighborhoods, fields, roads, and even graveyards. Climate-induced sea level rise threatens our major infrastructure, including ports and storage facilities, which are clustered around low-lying areas of Maduro Atoll, which is the capital atoll of the Marshall Islands. As sea level rise continues to rise, the Marshall Islands face escalating costs related to adapting and protecting essential infrastructures, which impacts the efficiency and viability of our trade routes. Of course, as a maritime nation and our communities separated by hundreds of miles of open ocean, we are totally dependent on our domestic shipping to connect to our country. These vast international distances coupled with the small size for our island communities make our domestic shipping one of our greatest costs and constraints. This is more than just enabling our own economy. Shipping is an essential public good necessary for delivering of all government services, health, education, justice, administration, et cetera. Every fluctuation in shipping and fuel costs impacts our government ability to provide the most basic services to our island. Additionally, we have to contend with the shocks arising out of wars that are currently happening. My country has not been immune to the increasing costs created by global conflicts. In fact, this impact has been exponential for us, including all SIDS who are remote from their markets. We have seen a marked increase in cost of fuel and food prices. Two vital goods which are essential for our economy, the increase in fuel price has also increased the cost by electricity, and this additional cost comes on top of already high domestic energy prices. In terms of solutions that the government took, the Marshall Islands has implemented the following measures and policies to strengthen our domestic economy against future shocks on the energy side in the long term. We seek to increase our renewable capacity to both reduce our reliance on diesel and reduce our domestic emissions. We have laid out our electricity roadmap back in 2018, where we aim to have our diesel use reduced to 50 percent below 2010 levels by 2030. 2025 and 65% reduction by 2030. We have submitted our national framework for transportation decarbonization, REVLIP 2015 to IMO back in 2015, where it is still the only national plan action for it. We have set emission reduction targets for our own shipping of 40% by 2030 and 100% by 2015 in our updated NDCs. We have also implemented strategies to increase efficiency measures on our domestic routes. Firstly, by centralizing loading and unloading points for islands, and secondly, using small vessels to decrease stops on larger vessel routes. Mr. Moderator, that’s what I have for you for the first question, so thank you all.

Matthew Wilson:
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Minister, and again, thank you so much for making the trip to be here. Now, we don’t have that much time left, so I’ll ask my other panelists if they can be even more focused going forward. And now we’re gonna turn to Mr. Simon Coffey, the Minister of Transport, Energy Communication and Innovation of Tuvalu, a beautiful island located in the Pacific, midway between Hawaii and Australia, but very deeply affected by the global supply chain movements, especially the rapid increase in food prices. So Minister, the floor is yours.

Simon Kofe:
Thank you, Matthew, and honorable ministers, panelists, Her Excellency, Secretary General, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen, and good afternoon to you all. It’s a pleasure to be here to share some insights on our experience in Tuvalu. in Tuvalu. Like my colleague from the Marshall Islands, my body clock is also still tuned to Tuvalu time, so forgive me for the low energy levels this afternoon. But nevertheless, thank you to the organisers, thank also the government and the people of Barbados for the excellent arrangements and making us feel very welcome in your country. Tuvalu is one of the smallest countries in the world in terms of land area, and I think the smallest on this panel. We have a population of 10,000 people, so I’m hearing one of the ministers saying they have a small population of 100,000 people, and I’m thinking that’s ten times our population in Tuvalu. So maybe we should have a special category for really small island developing states. But having said that, it is very rare for you to meet a Tuvaluan in your lifetime, so make the most of your opportunity to see us. I didn’t want to repeat again, because many of the challenges that have already been shared are the same across the board for all small island developing states. But I just wanted to take, I guess, just a broader look at the vulnerabilities of the global economic order that we are all a part of, and many of us have referred to experiences during the COVID-19 period. And I think if we look back in the past few decades, we’ve spent a lot of effort in integrating our economies, improving trade routes, removing trade barriers, and we’ve become so interconnected. And the motivation behind all this, the benefits that have come with globalization, we’ve all embraced that. We’ve seen the modernization of our countries. access to products and goods that are coming from different countries. But the motivation and the drive behind globalization has been the drive to put products in the markets and often, well, I think most of it is driven by commercial interest to get these products to the bigger markets. And given that small island developing states, we have small populations, small volumes that come to our islands, there’s very little incentive for big companies and corporations and shipping routes to serve our islands. And I think it’s important for us to look at the global context that we now find ourselves in because we’ve embraced the benefits, but we’re also finding that we’re becoming more vulnerable to each other’s actions. And COVID-19 is a perfect example of that. Climate change is another example of that, where actions by countries in different parts of the world is affecting countries like Tuvalu and small island developing states. And so that’s the global context that we now find ourselves in. And in an interconnected world, it’s important that we look at the values and the principles that underpins the economic order. Because living in an interconnected world, you need to be more responsible. You need to be more conscious of your actions and its impact on others. And Tuvalu is traditionally a community-based society, in that we live in very close-knit communities. We live with our families, extended families. We emphasize the importance of obligations and responsibility to the maintaining of the community order. One example is our land tenure system. Land is not owned by an individual, but it’s owned by families. clans, and so there is always a focus on the collective well-being, the collective interest, the collective ownership of assets and properties. And because we live in that kind of society, there are certain values, mindsets that we need to have in order to maintain that order. And I think these are becoming very relevant to the global community that now exists. Because we’re so interconnected, we’ve embraced the benefits of being interconnected, but we’re not focusing on the values that maintains this connectivity, these connections and networking that now exists. Countries are still driven by the national interest, immediate economic interest, at the expense of the environment, the impact on other countries. And so I just wanted to emphasize the global context that we now find ourselves in, and why we are always at a disadvantage when it comes to global trade, trade routes, is because there’s very little incentives, and the values that drive that system, although it’s beneficial to the world, it has its limits. And I think we are now finding out the limits when we are focusing purely on those values and not focusing on the responsibility and obligations of countries. And one example that I said is climate change. Countries like Tuvalu are facing the full brunt of the impacts of climate change for a problem that we did not create. And it’s important that we continue to advocate for countries to take stronger climate action, because we think it’s a problem only to small and developing states, but it’s not. It takes different forms for different countries, and it also impacts the supply chain. bushfire some years back in Australia, and that had a huge impact on the supply of wheat to the global market. And I think things are just going to get worse from here if countries are not taking action and not acting, and I think the window of opportunity for us to really change the course that we’re on is closing very, very quickly. And I just hope that we can get our act together in time before it’s too late. So, without going over the issues again, I just wanted to state that there’s just some general comments on our discussions this afternoon. Thank you.

Matthew Wilson:
Thank you. Thank you very much, very much, Minister. And I very much appreciate you highlighting this issue of a value-based approach to international trade, which is something that I don’t think we think about enough. And if in a couple of years you start to use the vernacular, really, small island developing states, remember, it started here in Barbados. So now we’re going to turn to Mr. George Tavo, the Deputy Secretary for the Ministry of Public Works, Metrological Services and Transport in Fiji. Barbados and Fiji, we have collaborated in a number of areas on the global scene, including on trade, on health and on climate change. And those of you here in the room who attended the climate change NCDs and mental health event that we had here in Barbados last year would recall that the decoration was a joint piece of work from Barbados and Fiji. So we work very closely together. So, Deputy Secretary, the floor is yours.

George Tavo:
Thank you, Chair. A big bula vinaga to you all. Thank you for receiving us this afternoon. First of all, I would like to thank the government of Barbados for hosting this event. And I believe… There’s a lot to come out in the next few days. When we look into the challenges that we face in the Pacific, I think I’ll just give a broader overview of what the situation is like in Fiji. First I would like to just give you a dive into the compositions of where things are in Fiji. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we have a landmass of around 18,000 square kilometres. We have about 300 small islands and a third actually inhabited. We have about $5 billion GDP. In terms of our infrastructure, we have about 7,000 plus kilometres of road, 1,300 of bridges and about 50 jetties. So that sort of gives an overview of the situation there in Fiji. So you will see that we are actually surrounded by the ocean. So Fiji, in terms of the challenges, lies in the tail end of the supply chain. So you can imagine pushing a container across to Fiji would cost about 50% more than what it would cost to send it across to Australia and New Zealand, which are our nearest neighbours. And for us to push that further to our further remote islands like in the Kiribati, it could be up as about 600% more. So if you look into the costs, that’s where things are at the moment. We don’t have the luxury to support operations or the movement of cargoes that is so expensive. We have limited resources. So, in terms of the other challenge that we have, the economic challenges, we have our tourism sector, the two main export commodities in Fiji, sugar and of course our tourism. But very recently, we have remittance as part of joining up the big boys at the top. We through the partnership with Australia, there’s a lot of temporary work permits, work contracts for Fiji to supply the labour to the Australian market. And that again, is creating a lot of challenges as well, as it’s sort of like moving the able population into Australia. And then if you move into the remote islands, you can almost see the elderly and the children. So in terms of the economic benefits of what can come out of these islands, it’s very low at the moment. So those are some of the challenges we are facing. Of course, the fuel, escalation of fuel prices is something that we have to bear with, as we rely a lot on the shipping sector to provide the movement of cargoes across the Fiji. Unfortunately, for your information, the aviation doesn’t fall under our ministry, so I wouldn’t be able to give you snapshots of what it is like over there. But I can recall that there were some complications when we brought in the National Alliance with a series of airbuses, and then the pandemic struck. And then we had some real, real issues in terms of our loan concessions and all that arrangements. But we are actually recovering. We are not there yet, about 0.6, negative 0.6 per cent of… contributions from the transport sector into our GDP. So we are actually moving towards full recovery in the near future. The other challenges that we face is in regard to our infrastructures, I believe particularly the jetties in the remote maritime islands. When we cannot access the jetties under deplorable conditions, get damages, you will understand that climate change, as my colleague from Tuvalu has mentioned, do affect us and creates a lot of problems. So if there’s a cutoff in terms of the supply chain in that respect, the people are affected. They can wait for months before their supplies are replenished. So that’s again another big challenge. So the way around it, we have to look into our policies. We need to look into – we are working with MFAT at the moment to develop our national transport strategy moving forward. We are also working with MFAT in regard to decarbonisation policy. There has been some discussions around green shipping ports and shipping corridors. That is an area that we are also in discussions with our fellow Pacific Island countries. There has been a lot of developments in that space, but we are hopeful that what comes out of the discussions in the next few days would help us address some of the pressing issues that we face in the Pacific Islands. Thank you.

Matthew Wilson:
Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Tavo. With the Pacific Island Forum being in Fiji, I hope that you will be able to take back home some of what you have heard here so that it can be disseminated throughout the Pacific region. So now we turn to Ms. Sandra Casanova, Presidente de la Commission Stratégique Logistique de Territoire de Martinique. Bienvenue. Vous préférez parler français ou anglais? Anglais, peut-être.

Sandra Casanova:
We can try in English, because I suppose in the room, not so many people speak and understand French. Thank you. Thank you, UNCTAD, for the invitation, and Minister, Ambassador, Excellencies, dear friends, I’m very happy to be there with you. I would like to start my speech, a short speech, don’t worry, because time is up. But I am the only woman on the stage, so I will try to. Thank you. First, I think we have to know each other. Martinique, it’s a French Caribbean island, but as Curacao, Martinique is an EU heart of most region. So, we have to know, in the Greater Caribbean, we have four languages, and I would like to say five. You have French, English, Spanish, Dutch, but also Brazilian. So, it’s a huge market. And someone said, maritime lines follow volume. We have the volume within the Greater Caribbean. But some people believe because we live on a small island, so small island means low economy. I can tell you it’s wrong, because you can live on a small island and become an innovator. country, and also be able to open your economy, your market. So you are a kind of bridge between your economy and the other islands, but also between your economy and when as Martinique you are part of European Union, you become a bridge with the European Union market. I don’t want to talk too long about difficulty or issues we had during pandemic COVID or with different crises we have in the world, because I think we have to be solution makers. We have to be doers, just that. And we need to address the issue of logistic and supply chain with a holistic and integrated approach. It’s very important. I think if we continue to just reflect about, okay, what we can produce and who wants to buy our production, it’s a mistake. So we need more data. And I will tell you what we are doing, because we work a lot about supply chain in Martinique. I have to tell you, Martinique, it’s a region, a territory, but with more and more autonomy from France. So we are working on a different strategy to be able to increase our GDP and also to be more connected with the rest of the world. And we created the strategy, the commission, logistic strategy, it’s a commission but it’s a part of the Assembly of Martinique. And the collectivity of Martinique have two parts, Assembly of Martinique and Executive Council. Thank you. So just to tell you, first, we understand, we know, we know we can have politics or diplomatic agreements between different countries but really what connect two countries, it’s about supply chain. So we have to work on this part, this aspect. Supply chain, how can you say, it’s a materialization of the flow and it’s very important for us. So we have a project of free zone but we call it custom zone in Martinique. We have a port, a deep water port. We are working on another port to facilitate inter-regional trade. We have an international airport but we are working on the customs aspect and all about trade facilitation. And I don’t know if I said everything, maybe I would like to say more but we don’t have so much time. But again, thank you.

Matthew Wilson:
Thank you. Thank you so much, Ms. Casanova, and we have a lot of time. We have three days for you to discuss these issues with everyone here because what I hear for you is a call to action to the Caribbean in particular to see Martinique as a real economic partner. So I really hope that you’re going to use these three days to make those connections with our CARICOM colleagues here in the room. So colleagues, what I would now like to do is to call up to the podium, we have two more things before we end, call up to the podium Ms. Tricia Tannis, who is the chairperson of the Barbados Private Sector Association. And we have asked Ms. Tannis to listen carefully to everything that the ministers have said this afternoon and to give her reflections. Do you agree? Do you disagree? Tricia, the floor is yours.

Trisha Tannis:
Good afternoon, can everyone hear me? Excellent. Fantastic. Well, I’m staring at a screen that says time’s up. So I’m going to be very succinct. First of all, thank you so much to the Barbados government and to Secretary General for having the foresight to host this very impacting and profoundly timed session and conference this week. So as I told Matthew earlier, he gave me the hardest task of everyone today. And it was my duty to listen very, very keenly to these extremely interesting and riveting and compelling stories about people, ultimately, that are being impacted across the globe in small island developing states. What was very clear is that we are all sharing a very similar experience. What was also very interesting was that a lot of the stories went back to survival during the pandemic. And I thought that was a very, very interesting observation, because we all have a shared experience. And it’s almost as if we set the clock back and we start essentially our stories from the pandemic. It’s very interesting that we’ve all coalesced around food security. That was a very compelling point. We coalesced around concessionary financing, the definition of high-income countries, the fact that high income does not translate into lack of vulnerability. We coalesced around economic resilience, lots of plans to invest in trade infrastructure. Clearly in essence, we did not waste the crisis. The crisis became a wake-up call, a clarion call to us in the region and with our colleagues across the world that certainly we could not do things the same way. What I love about what’s happened already today is that the private sector has had an opportunity to tell their stories, and I’m going to do a similar thing in a minute. During COVID, I was also the chairman or the president of the Barbados Chamber of Commerce. And for those of you who don’t live in small island developing states, you may still at this point be wondering what’s the big deal? Why is there such a preoccupation with vulnerability resilience, those sorts of themes? When the Barbados government took several actions, and you heard Minister Simmons outline several of them, but there were a couple of things even before we had to neutralize or develop vulnerability in our society against existential shocks. The Barbados government decided that it was going to waive port charges during the period of the pandemic. And the private sector reached out to the Florida Shipping Association for consideration to a relief from the freight rates. And I have to say, very, very quickly, they agreed because of the precedent that was set by the Barbados government, quote, unquote, they said, if the Barbados government is willing to forego the revenue, we’re going to do the same thing. We attempted to reach out to the shipping companies, the deep sea shipping companies, with zero impact, zero impact. Now, you would have heard this morning our Prime Minister quote the fact that 80… percent of global trade is on the sea. For SIDS, that could get as high as 95% of our global trade. A little-known fact is that that trade is concentrated in the hands of five global companies. Five global companies essentially control half, half of global trade. And what essentially happened was nothing short of a humanitarian crisis. When you live in a small island developing state and you cannot get access to food or to affordable food, essentially you create a humanitarian crisis. If it wasn’t for our trading partners, like the African collaboration with our vaccines, you could have easily seen the 7 million persons, the death rate from COVID, rise even higher as a result of additional deaths. This is not a global supply chain forum. This is a forum about people. It’s a forum about vulnerable populations across the globe. I’ll leave on three points. One, you heard Minister Simmons speak about a local social compact. It’s a collaboration between the private sector, the trade unions, and the government under something that we call a social partnership. It’s a construct that’s heavily promoted by the ILO. I’m sure you’ll hear more about that over the next few days. That construct allowed us to sit down together in very hard negotiations, as you could imagine, and to come up with something that ultimately redounded to the benefit of vulnerable economies. What does that matter to the private sector? Because we all understand that we cannot survive in a bubble. We need to feed our societies and have a symbiotic relationship with our communities around us. We therefore make a call, then, for a global version. of the local Barbadian social compact. What was clear was that there was no mechanism to stop the increase in freight rates. They could go as high, as high as they could. We have governments who are here and who we agree took very, very strong positions where they would cap the impact on their population and that helped, but it was not sustainable. It was a short-term measure. We do need, for the UN, to implement mechanisms such that, Lord forbid, we bought this away again, there needs to be some sort of moral capacity, moral suede, and understanding, a global social compact, if you will, with the large global companies that in the interest of humanitarianism, there should be some cessation on how far those freight rates can go. As we speak today, I can read a note that I got from my own company. This is not something that happened two years ago. This is not something that we future-proof against. This is happening again as we speak. As we speak, container availability in China is drying up. As we speak, there are choke points in Mexico, in the ports, as we speak, the Panama Canal still has not been re-hydro-carbonized and we have floods in Brazil. It is easy to say diversify your supply chains, but when you have these geopolitical shocks literally all over the world and when you have three or four major trading groups essentially subject to some sort of challenge, you run out of places to diversify. We also call therefore upon the UN system to use whatever influence they have to try to quell the geopolitical tensions. It used to be wars used to end very quickly. We now have a war in Ukraine that’s going into two years. We have a war in Israel and Hamas going on into six, seven, eight months. These things lead to other things, and the rest of us essentially in the small island developing states essentially feel everything. I want to quote Gerd Müller. He said, everything affects everything. That could not be more true. Everything does affect everything. One final point, the global economic order. We completely agree with Minister, I think it was Kofi, also echoed by Seychelles Minister, and I would point you to the Barbados and British Long Initiative because the Prime Minister has done phenomenal things in terms of elevating the right to access concessionary financing for small island developing states, and she’s been a global voice and has successfully been able to inspire the Resilient Sustainability Trust mechanism of the IMF, which allows at least climate resilience to be built into concessionary funding, and that essentially gives small island developing states a little bit of breathing room to recover after climate catastrophes. In summary, we do stand with our ministers. We are extremely proud as a private sector. The strides that you’re all making to make your countries resilient, clearly there’s more that brings us together than separates us, notwithstanding our vast ocean spaces. It sounds to me, Minister Simmons, that maybe we need to rope in our fellow colleagues in the Pacific into our British Long Initiative and expand our influence on that initiative to other countries. Ladies and gentlemen, I thank you so much for the opportunity to bring the private sector’s opinion from the Barbados side to you, and I wish you an enjoyable two or three days. Congratulations.

Matthew Wilson:
Thank you. Tricia, please please stay on stage and I would also like Mr. Hall to come on stage with us, please. And of course our UN Trade and Development Secretary General, Rebecca Greenspan, because today we are officially launching the Ministerial Statement for Enhancing Transport and Logistics in Small Island Development States, which will be a key outcome of this Global Supply Chain Forum and will also be a key input into Stage 4. So can I ask all ministers and the SG and our private sector friends to join us on the stage for a photo op.