Suriname

APA drilling more prospects offshore

Aug. 4, 2022

Apache entered Suriname after winning bids for Block 53 and Block 58 offshore in 2012 and 2015, respectively. Those assets were transferred to APA Corp. Suriname in 2021. Block 58 comprises 1.4 million acres, and Block 53 covers 867,000 acres.

HOUSTON — APA Corp. has issued a brief update on its offshore E&P operations in its latest results statement. APA and partner/operator TotalEnergies plan further appraisal of the Krabdagu Field offshore Suriname after completing two flow tests on the discovery well. APA and partners are drilling further on exploration wells on Block 58 (Dikkop) and Block 53 (Baja), with results expected in the coming months. Finally, the company expects to shortly bring onstream the Garten-3 well, a tieback to the Beryl complex in the UK central North Sea.

 

APA finds first oil in Block 53 offshore Suriname

Aug. 23, 2022

HOUSTON — APA Corp. has made its first oil discovery in Block 53 offshore Suriname.
The Noble Gerry de Souza drilled the Baja-1 well in 1,140 m (3,740 ft) of water and to a subsurface depth of 5,290 m (17,356 ft), with the well intersecting 34 m (112 ft) of net oil pay in a single interval in the Campanian.

Initial fluid and log analysis shows a light oil with a gas-oil ratio (GOR) of 1,600 cf/bbl to 2,200 cf/bbl in a good-quality reservoir. The discovery is a downdip lobe of the same depositional system as the Krabdagu discovery, drilled 11.5 km to the west in offshore Block 58. Evaluation continues of openhole well logs, cores and reservoir fluids.

CEO and president John J. Christmann said, “This result confirms our geologic model for the Campanian in the area and helps to de-risk other prospects in the southern portion of both blocks 53 and 58.”

APA gained regulatory approval for an amendment to the Block 53 production sharing contract, with options to extend the exploration period by up to four years. APA has a 45% operated interest in Block 53, with Petronas holding 30% and CEPSA 25%.

The Noble Gerry de Souza drillship will shortly mobilize to Block 58 to drill the Awari exploration prospect for APA and operator TotalEnergies, 27 km north of their Maka Central discovery. In the same block, the Dikkop exploration well has been plugged and abandoned after encountering water-bearing sandstones in the targeted interval.

The Maersk Valiant drillship will relocate to drill a second appraisal well at Sapakara South, where the consortium conducted a successful flow test last year.

 

 

Two-rig drilling programme to resume offshore Suriname

Drillship Noble Gerry de Souza will move to prospective licence to assist in drilling operations

4 August 2022
By Fabio Palmigiani in Rio de Janeiro

French supermajor TotalEnergies and US independent Apache are poised to have a pair of rigs in operation again in Block 58 offshore Suriname to expedite exploration and appraisal activities in the area.

The partners have already made five discoveries — Maka Central-1, Sapakara West-1, Kwaskwasi-1, Keskesi-1 and Krabdagu-1 — in Block 58 since January 2020, with the latter estimated to hold more than 180 million barrels of oil in place.

TotalEnergies and Apache are presently drilling the Dikkop-1 wildcat with the Maersk Drilling drillship Maersk Valiant, while Apache is drilling the Baja-1 exploration well in adjacent Block 53 with the Noble Corporation drillship Noble Gerry de Souza.

LNG project proceeds off Suriname

Aug. 5, 2022

Courtesy Firebird LNG

Offshore staff

HOUSTON – The developers of Firebird LNG, a proposed project offshore Suriname, say that the project is now fully funded through to final investment decision.

Firebird LNG is designed to gather natural gas, much of which would otherwise be wasted through flaring, and turn it into liquefied natural gas.

The project’s development site is located near Nickerie, Suriname, and will serve as a gas solution for platforms in the territorial waters of both Suriname and Guyana. E&P projects in this region currently lack outlets for their associated gas, and this undermines both the environment and the economic growth potential of the region, say Firebird LNG officials.

Firebird LNG will build both an offshore natural gas transportation system and a liquefaction plant, which will become the centerpiece of a planned deepwater port.

Locating the plant in the port will improve logistics, operations and infrastructure utilization, said Walter Teter, CEO of Firebird LNG LLC. Firebird is jointly owned by Houston-based Phoenix Development Holding Company LLC and Idaho-based MAD Energy LP.

“As the anchor project of the deepwater port, the liquefaction plant will represent the single largest onshore industrial investment in Suriname to date,” Teter said.

The LNG plant is expected to be operational by the end of 2024. Firebird LNG will sell the majority of its output under long-term contracts, Teter added. The planned output is 4 million tons per year, but there is room for expansion if demand warrants. The total gas resource in the basin is estimated at 35 trillion cubic feet which is well in excess of the requirements of Firebird LNG.

08.05.2022

 

CDB Partners with ECSRC to Bring Crowdfunding to Eastern Caribbean MSMEs

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados – August 24, 2022:

Building on the Caribbean Development Bank’s (CDB) focus on innovation and increasing access to financing to ensure growth and development, the regional financial institution has partnered with the Eastern Caribbean Securities Regulatory Commission (ECSRC) to develop a solution to improve the availability of funding to Micro Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (MSMEs) and establish equity-based crowdfunding in the Eastern Caribbean.

Through the 18-month Increasing Access to Finance for Micro, Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union Countries Through the Development of a Crowdfunding Framework Project funded by CDB and implemented by the ECSRC, a viable equity crowdfunding platform will be established in Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) member countries by 2023 supported by an appropriate regulatory framework.Crowdfunding is an innovative, technology-based activity which utilises online platforms to economically and effectively connect potential individuals, firms and groups seeking to raise capital with potential funders. Equity-based crowdfunding, which is being pursued under this project, allows prospective investors to offer funding to businesses in exchange for shares or an equity stake in these businesses.

According to Lisa Harding, Coordinator, Micro Small and Medium Sized Development, CDB  “The Bank is cognisant of the significance of MSMEs in the economic ecosystems of the region, and while recovery post pandemic has been slow within the sector, through this arrangement greater collateral will be mobiilsed to effect an accelerated and even more successful rebound, among Eastern Caribbean businesses.”

The project was conceptualised based on needs articulated by the sector. Access to finance, particularly in the wake of COVID-19, remains a major impediment to growth for Caribbean MSMEs. There are approximately 20,000[1] MSMEs in the Eastern Caribbean which comprise 95% of enterprises and contribute 50% of GDP and employment. Beyond closure, many of the smaller firms which survived are facing severe cash flow problems because of public health restrictions and implications on trade and business. This initiative seeks to both enhance the environment and support increased access to finance for MSMEs in the ECCU.

The first phase of the project includes capacity building sessions which will be administered by the ECSRC commencing September 2022. Activities include cross sectoral stakeholder engagement and awareness building, training in crowdfunding and equity investing for entrepreneurs and investors with a gender lens.

The project will also deliver a Crowdfunding Policy Framework developed by the ECSRC and a prototype for testing and finetuning. The project responds to ongoing challenges faced by MSMEs owing to the sector’s informality. Within the sector small firms that could qualify for financing from commercial banks, frequently do not apply because of complex application procedures and high interest rates.

MSMEs also face a knowledge gap regarding information on the various financing programmes available, both at the local and regional levels. There is also limited capital aside from commercial bank loans, as well as some grants and funds available through development banks and international donor agencies. Crowdfunding therefore offers an alternative financial instrument that provides new avenues for investment, particularly in under-developed capital markets such as the ECCU.

Contact:

Cassie Ann James
Corporate Communications Officer
Mobile: +1 (246) 262-3982
Email: cassieann.james@caribank.org

visit https://ecsrccrowdfunding.com/

[1] SME Finance Forum, MSME Finance Database (updated 2018).

 

 

President Ali on State Visit in Trinidad and Tobago

August 17, 2022

President Dr Irfaan Ali arrived in Trinidad and Tobago for a State Visit.

The two countries explored areas of cooperation on the follow-up to the visit Prime Minister Keith Rowley made to Guyana where a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed..

“We will be going through what they are doing, the evolution of their industrial development, manufacturing, we will go through the MoU to look at areas we can move forward very quickly and that is directly between Guyana and Trinidad in agriculture, the removal of the trade barriers which we have been working on for the last few months,” President Ali said before departing Guyana.

Trinidad and Tobago also signaled its intentions to build the energy corridor with Guyana and Suriname to have a broad development concept for gas strategy for the region.

“The Prime Minister and I discussed this, and the Prime Minister has expressed Trinidad’s willingness to work with Guyana and Suriname in the development of our gas resource and look at other opportunities in the energy sector. So, that has been communicated,.”

President Ali said the second half of his visit will see his participation in the T&T Agri Investment Forum from August 19 to 21, which will allow CARICOM leaders to assess progress made to reduce the regional food import bill by 25 percent by 2025 for which Guyana has the lead role.

He will also be meeting the leadership of the T&T-headquartered Republic Bank Limited to discuss financing for Investment in agriculture.“They have aside some resources for the food production system in agriculture so there are a number of proposals that Guyana has been able to work with other countries in developing,” he disclosed.

President Ali explains economic agenda in Trinidad

August 20, 2022

Guyana’s transformational agenda makes provision for increased government expenditure in areas such as housing, healthcare, education, agriculture and other critical sectors, and therefore, there needs to be a balance in the management of the resources. While the robust economic development will continue, expenditure will be managed to prevent an overheating of the economy.

In an interview with CNC3 Television on a State Visit to Trinidad and Tobago President Dr. Irfaan Ali said,

“Overheating is when there is over expenditure in the system, and there is no mopping up from the monetary side. So, this is something that we are managing, that we are very cautious about. You can get carried away very easily when you have resources coming your way and go on a massive expansion plan or expenditure plan, that can cause hyperinflation, overheating and especially operating in the conditions that we are operating under now, where globally you have rising cost of food.”

Some expenditure that cannot be avoided. “We are ensuring that whatever we do, we are not overextending ourselves, we are not overextending the financial system, and we are keeping to the transformative investment.”

With these essential investments in the national transformative agenda, comes the responsibility to put more money into the pockets of ordinary Guyanese through job creation or other measures. Government has been able to create thousands of jobs in various sectors, since it assumed office in August 2020, in keeping with its manifesto promise.

In the booming housing programme thousands of citizens gain employment as well as part-time jobs in Government.

“Our cost for energy will come down by 50 per cent, that will create a new wave of jobs in the industrial and manufacturing sectors…we have six new hotels coming on stream, we have the screen 6,000 people at least to work in the hospitality sector.”

While the emerging economy is creating enough opportunity for jobs, the issue of skilled labour arises., The Administration is building the capacity and knowledge of the local workforce in preparation for jobs through the expansion of the scholarship programme and of the local technical and vocational programmes to cater for new and emerging sectors.

Agri-Investment Forum and Expo in Trinidad

Roles in regional food security

Caricom technocrats emphasised the importance of agriculture and what they expect of citizens in efforts to achieve food security. Public Utilities Minister Marvin Gonzales said his ministry was essential to economic development of Trinidad and Tobago as it provides water and electricity.

“So what we are seeing here…, the vast display, the great innovation and thrust of development in our agricultural sector cannot be done if the Ministry of Public Utilities doesn’t have the policy of the government where public utilities are concerned. It cannot happen because we have to ensure we have sufficient water to irrigate our crops, we have to ensure that power is put on our farms.”

Many farmers in TT, and possibly the entire region, operate outside the electricity grid. The ministry plans to place solar panels at farms so they have access to power.

“Even though they are not integrated into the electricity world, they can now have access to solar power to power their farms.”

The ministry will use its modular water treatment plants to boost the water supply.“There are many ground and surface water that we have not harvested, and a number of rural communities do not have access to water, and with the use of modular water treatment plants we are going to bring to TT, we are going to target the rural communities because they have access to rivers and water wells. So, we are going to get the water treated by those plants because they can be easily and strategically placed around the communities.”

This will provide water in homes and farms that will result in more locally-sourced foods. Those interested in a power supply can apply to the ministry’s electrification and solar electrification programmes. The cost is between $50,000 and $60,000 to provide power to homes or farms.

At the National Academy for the Performing Arts, Caricom officials discussed the need to promote healthy eating, the benefits of incorporating technology into agriculture, financing for small and medium farms and boosting trade and investments in the region.

Shaun Baugh, programme manager of agricultural and agro-industrial development of Guyana, said many ongoing projects include de-risking of the regional agriculture sector, regional insurance, alternative sources of financing and removal of tariff barriers.

At the food and nutrition panel, co-founder of Empower Nutrition Ltd Mweia Elias said nutrition is overlooked when it comes to discussing food security.

“There is no conversation about food security without nutrition security.”

Covid19 discussions overshadowed that of chronic illnesses and at least 60 per cent of TT’s population suffers from over-nutrition. Many patients express a love-hate relationship with flour and said there must be more options that are easily accessible.

At the agriculture, finance and marketing panel, Karen Yip Chuck, general manger, commercial and retail banking said Republic Bank Ltd (RBL committed GYD$2 billion (TT$64.9 million) to help micro-projects blossom to large scale in the country.

“RBL can provide the financing but it may not be accessible to the people who need it if they do not have business cases, they need to show performer financials – what their cash flow is.”

TT has the Agricultural Development Bank (ADB) but other countries in the region may not hence RBL’s commitment to the cause. ADB chairman Sekou Mark said 25 per cent of the 650 loans the ADB issues annually were to young entrepreneurs.

A memorandum of understanding was signed with the Caricom Private Sector Organisations, Caribbean Supermarket Association, Manufacturers’ Association and Agri-Business Association, and a declaration was signed by Prime Minister Rowley and Caricom Private Sector.

Delegates met representatives at booths of companies such as Ariaponics and Trintrac, the Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Fisheries and the Agricultural Society of TT., who explained the benefits, challenges and solutions in farming.

At the Ariaponics booth, manager Alex Jones showed how large and crisp lettuce and herb chadon beni /bandhania grew with the nutrients circulated into the hydroponic syste. The entire process operates with solar power. Lettuce takes a around 30 days before they are ready for consumption.

For over a century rural farmers, blessed with tropical sunshine and ample rain grew lettuce on wooden tables/machans, used a watering can in the dry season and animal manure for fertiliser. In the centennial of ICTA, agriculture should be booming with iconic fruit and vegetables but paltry budgets, praedial larceny, dilapidated infrastructure and addiction to imports brought farming to its knees over 6 decades of economic mismanagement and corruption.

Profitable WITCO can invest in fruit trees to provide nourishing food after divesting tobacco- a health risk and fire risk, consuming fertile land in cultivation and natural gas in manufacture.

While alcohol is a health risk, a cause of crime, accidents and domestic abuse, profitable Angostura produced a new rum costing $20,000 a bottle.

Nestle can be incentivised to farm water buffalo for milk, cheese, meat and leather, conserving wetlands and reducing flooding, supported by UWI research, now wasted on rodent agouti.

Unilever ceased manufacturing and another company will continue part of the food business for 5 years. This is a splendid opportunity for local private investors to build a profitable company to process local crops for food, detergents, toiletries and perfumes.

Vacant lots can be requisitioned for nourishing corn and peas, easy to grow, harvest, prepare, cook and digest unlike toxic cassava. Cottage industries can produce herbs, spices and snacks to provide jobs for families.

Guyana to contribute to universal energy access

August 4, 2022

Prime Minister, Brigadier (Ret’d), Mark Phillips told the International Solar Alliance (ISA) 4th Regional Committee Meeting for the Latin America and Caribbean Region that Guyana will be able to contribute to universal energy access, address energy security needs, and advance climate change mitigation efforts with adequate and timely technological and financial support for the development and execution of solar energy projects.

“Guyana is ready to work with its fellow members states and the ISA to realize the ISA goals of increasing the deployment of solar energy technologies while contribution to universal energy access, promoting energy security and supporting low carbon transmissions.”

The three-day meeting will facilitate dialogue among member-states and ISA on strategic priorities and initiatives on solar energy development aligned with the goals of the ISA.

Prime Minister Phillips, who holds responsibility for the energy sector, stressed the importance of such platforms, which foster a conversance with policy makers and stakeholders, who together, will develop innovative solutions that will shape the regional agenda for clean energy transitions particularly, for the uptake of solar energy technologies. The contributions of the ISA continue to reveal the importance of such a partnership in the region.

Existence of the ISA reminds the policymakers in the region of how vital strategic alliances are in the increased deployment of solar energy technologies. Such partnerships have a direct nexus to the implementation of multilateral commitments and agreements in keeping with the Sustainable Development Goals of accessing affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all.

“The ISA has been and will continue to be impactful in the region. It is action oriented, member driven and collaborative.”

The prime minister acknowledged the value of solar energy, primarily considered the fastest growing renewable energy source, particularly in large-scale power generation. This value creates an urgent call for the acceleration of the use of solar energy for citizens’ daily needs.

Under its Low Carbon Development Strategy (LDCS) 2030, Guyana will undertake an approach of decoupling economic growth from fossil use in power generation by developing renewable and clean energy resources to meet increasing electricity demands and maintain low greenhouse gas emissions.

Among the projects the country is embarking on are;

• energy access through investments in solar PV systems in off grid areas, expansion of the Hinterland Electrification Programme,
• the replacement and upgrade of existing solar PV systems in the hinterland, and
• the development of microgrids for large hinterland areas.

Guyana benefits from the ISA’s corporation assistance in the areas of technical corporation and grant assistance. Therefore, the Government of Guyana looks forward for greater opportunities and collaboration as the country embarks on the transformation of the energy sector.

Low Carbon economy

August 4, 2022

Prime Minister Brigadier (Ret’d) Mark Phillips reiterated government commitment to achieving a low carbon economy through energy diversification in his feature address to the International Solar Alliance’s (ISA) Fourth Committee Meeting for Latin America and the Caribbean Region in Guyana.

At the three-day event Guyana will add its voice to the alignment of the region’s strategic priorities and initiatives in the area of solar power generation. ISA is a member-driven and collaborative platform aimed at increasing the deployment of solar energy technologies as a means of enhancing energy access, ensuring energy security, and driving energy transition in its member countries.

The prime minister lauded the collaboration between ISA and its members in delivering sustainable solar energy solutions.

“The Government of Guyana has benefitted from the ISA’s support in the areas of technical cooperation and grant assistance. These projects include the Solar PV Demonstration Project at the Orealla Health Centre, and training and capacity-building sessions for Guyanese professionals…in the area of solar technologies.”

PM Phillips, who holds responsibility for the energy sector, reaffirmed Guyana’s commitment to developing a low-carbon economy with a transition to clean energy as a national priority.

“Our government is committed to achieving a low carbon economy and advancing the nation’s transition away from conventional energy sources. As the minister responsible for energy, I am extremely heartened by the timeliness of ISA’s contributions in the area of solar energy development.”

The administration’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) 2030 will see Guyana becoming a front runner in the fight against climate change.

“…Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy which promotes, among other things, the development of utility-scale solar PV farms, solar mini-grids and solar home systems as part of our country’s ongoing energy transformation.”

Minister within the Ministry of Public Works, Deodat Indar, Vice President for the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region of the ISA, said that Guyana is charting a path of undeniable development through beneficial partnerships with the ISA.

“We are working with the ISA to make sure that we can learn, [and] that we can benefit from the skills within the ISA secretariat.”

Director General of the ISA, Dr Ajay Mathur congratulated the government on its work in drafting the LCDS 2030, and its intention of tabling it in the National Assembly.

“Prime Minister, I’d like to congratulate you…on the LCDS and [the plan to] take it to0 parliament, and paving the way forward.”

A one-megawatt solar farm is being developed in Lethem and is expected to officially commence operations later this week.

Guyana’s involvement in these meetings forms part of the administration’s commitment to creating an energy mix for cleaner, more reliable sources of energy. The ISA seeks to develop and deploy cost-effective and transformational energy solutions powered by the sun to help member countries develop low-carbon growth trajectories, with particular focus on delivering impact in countries categorised as Least Developed Countries (LDCs) and the Small Island Developing States (SIDS).

 

 

CARICOM renewable energy hub

August 4, 2022

At the International Solar Alliance (ISA) Fourth Meeting of the Regional Committee of the Latin America and Caribbean Region, His Excellency Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali proposed key questions for consideration by regional energy ministers and other stakeholders to develop a concrete plan that will see the transition to renewable energy use in an environmentally sustainable and economically viable manner.

The meeting is being held against the backdrop of transitions at the global, regional and national levels, to renewable energy sources.

“Transition means that there is a gap that needs to be filled and what fills that gap is a question that we must answer. How do we fill that gap? What is the cost of filling the gap? What is the most sustainable way of filling that gap until the world can transition to the position you want it to be?”

He reminded delegates that transitioning to renewable energy sources is not a ‘cheap’ process, pointing out that the region has not mastered the technology and is yet to demonstrate the financial and economic viability of a singular transition application that is sustainable in the long-term. A number of pertinent questions must also be considered as it relates specifically to solar energy.

“Where is the supply of batteries coming from? What is the replacement cost of the batteries? What is the environmental damage in dumping those batteries? And how do we work on recycling those batteries? What will be those challenges when it comes, for us? Let us use these forums to advance those discussions.”

Discussions need to be holistic, otherwise, long-term solutions for sustainable development and energy supply would not be realised.

Caribbean Community (CARICOM) must utilise natural assetst to ensure the necessary funds are acquired for the realisation of the renewable energy goal.

“Let us face it, we are no way close to reaching five per cent of the adaptation and mitigation cost for the developing world, who is going to finance it? Where that financing is coming from? Loans are not the sustainable answer especially when it is variable interest rate loans.”

Policymakers must engage in frank and open discussions. “If we say that we are not on a path to transition into cleaner energy and renewable energy, then we are not part of the global framework that will see and sustain livelihood on earth. No country that wants to accomplish a development path that is based on sustainability can do so without understanding that they must have a plan, an overall plan as to how we want to achieve renewable energy.”

In developing the plan as it relates to solar, leaders must be realistic and consider several factors including affordability, social good, transference of the technology, recurring costs and impact on national budgets, as well as the availability of viable economic models, among others.

The economic model must be viable at both the household and national levels. In advancing solar as the most reliable source, policymakers and other stakeholders must put forward not only the benefits, but the proposal has to be premised on a complete energy platform.

CARICOM, has an opportunity to create a renewable energy hub. The renewable energy market in the Community is worth some US$16 billion and to achieve its renewable energy target, would require an investment of approximately US$11 billion, over the next 10 years. CARICOM has committed that 47 per cent of its energy would come from renewable sources by 2027. This achievement would see a reduction in oil imports by 260 million barrels of oil and carbon emissions by 26 per cent. This potential includes solar, wind, biomass, and hydrogen. The Fourth Meeting ended on Friday, August 5.

 

Replace TTD with USD
as USA acquires CARICOM unincorporated territory

Aug 04 2022

Should T&T adopt similar measures to that of Barbados which saw the recent widening of its VAT-free basket of goods, as food prices continue to soar with high inflation?
T&T-born regional economist Dr Justin Ram based in Barbados recommends that the T&T Government abolish Value Added Tax (VAT) and implement a simple sales tax to alleviate the burden on citizens and stimulate economic growth.

Describing VAT as a “cumbersome tax” Ram explained, “Replace it (VAT) with a general, simpler sales tax at a lower rate than what VAT is right now. The bulk of income should really be coming from a sales tax and reduce the burden of income taxes particularly on PAYE (Pay As You Earn) and on corporation tax because, ultimately, you need to get investment going and give people the opportunity to get good paying jobs.”

Last month Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley unveiled an $18 million package to provide relief, acknowledging the daily constraints citizens face in dealing with high prices for basic goods, energy, and gas.

The Barbadian Government added 44 more home and food products to the list of items exempt from paying VAT as a result of the relief measures. Some products had customs tariffs lifted, which allowed for price reductions for consumers which will last through January 31 next year.
Trade Minister Paula Gopee-Scoon on more VAT-free goods on the local shelves said,

“There are thousands of VAT-free food items in T&T, and this is in addition to another 20 basic food items within most instances no duty. This Government has paid enormous attention to ensuring that basic food items are available through the provision of close to US $1 billion in FX support. There have been no empty shelves.”

Ram said VAT has wider economic implications for T&T, one of which is the Government continuing to owe millions of dollars in returns to businesseswhich are often paid late and thus cripple operations.

“In effect, the Government is taking a loan via VAT payments and not repaying the rebates until much later on, sometimes years. That money is now out of the corporate hands and they can’t use that for investment.
“That’s not a good thing. Instead, implement a smaller sales tax on everything, maybe there could be some exemptions, but that simple sales tax could be about five per cent.”

This would, therefore,enable the business environment to be enhanced as there would now be revenue for reinvestment into the economy.
Ram warned that Government should avoid heading in the direction of short-term tax fixes given the present inflation but rather focus on transforming the economy; the bigger picture.

“Let’s face it. The economy needed transforming even before this high level of inflation. And what I keep hearing is we are going to wait. We are to make short-term fixes. Short-term fixes are not what we need.
“We are always going to be vulnerable to all these changes in the global market which, before were coming every few years but now seems to be coming every six months.”

Emphasising that the Government needs to make the economy much more resilient, Ram suggested one measure must be private sector investment.

“Reducing corporation tax, reducing taxes on profit including dividends, including shareholdings is something you really need to consider,.”.

Households cannot survive from Government handouts. Rather, such survival depends on access to well-paid jobs.

Barbados had announced a cut to its VAT from 17.5 per cent to 7.5 per cent for the power charge up to the first 250 kilowatt hours of residential electricity bills to assist householders’ electricity costs.
As a result, their cost will decrease from $204.46 to $187.06 for them. This will cost the Barbados government $1.527 million each month, or just $10.5 million in total, for the period from August 1 to January 31.
However, according to Ram this is not practical for T&T, mainly because this country already enjoys low electricity rates.

In Barbados the cost of electricity is around US 30 cents per kilowatt hour while locally it’s around US six cents per kilowatt hour.

“Electricity is already heavily subsidised in T&T. There’s no more room to subsidise that unless you say you’re giving away electricity. And anything that requires Government trying to control the prices, stay away from it.
“Even that policy in Barbados, I really don’t agree with because it eventually comes back to bite the Government and the economy,” Ram warned.

Get rid of the TT $, reform Central Bank
Regarding other measures at reforming the TT economy, Ram advised replacing the TT dollar.
Like other Caribbean currencies , this only serves to drag economic activity. Instead, replace these currencies with the US dollar, Ram suggested.

“Let everyone start understanding you are earning a US dollar and this would smooth so many transactions even at an international level. The use of national currencies has many more costs than benefits because you are still constrained by having foreign currency reserves to back that local currency. So why not just put that foreign currency reserve into the hands of ordinary people and into the corporation? Convert out the TT dollar into the reserves.”.

That currency in circulation, therefore, will ultimately become the reserves which also means that trading on a global scale becomes much easier,

“For me that’s a big topic which needs to be considered to help these countries move forward.”

Is getting rid of the TT$ easy?
According to Ram it’s a process which is not difficult. For instance, the prices of goods and services can be both in TT and US currency which is a first step.

“So you already then say the US currency becomes legally accepted in the country for all transactions. It’s a parallel system happening at the same time. And over time, like over a year, transition to using only US currency. So you start to slowly roll back and get rid of the TT dollar while the US dollar becomes the main thing,.”.

TT dollar holding will also be replaced with the US dollar, making it more beneficial.
Ram referenced a paper titled, “The Time Has Come to Permanently Retire All Our Caribbean Currencies” by former Governor of the Central Bank of Barbados DeLisle Worrell.

Caribbean currencies have outlived their usefulness and become a liability. They were devised at a time when most payments were made using notes and coins, issued in distant metropolitan centres, Worrell outlined, saying scarcity of the means of payment was a severe hindrance to commerce.

“In response currency boards were set up, to issue local currency as needed in the colonies. The system worked well because the local currency issue was backed by an equivalent value of Sterling, in a global system of fixed exchange rates. In contrast, nowadays payments are made mostly by electronic communication, credit and debit cards, cheques and drafts, with settlement over digitized bank accounts,” Worrell explained.

However, in today’s world an own currency has become a liability for small economies, limiting access to international goods and services, exposing residents to risks of currency devaluation and inflation, eroding the value of domestic savings, increasing economic inequalities, providing a tool for unproductive government spending, and diverting attention from the need to increase productivity and enhance international competitiveness.

Worrell said while retiring local currency is seen by uniformed observers as a surrender of economic sovereignty, exactly the opposite is true: exclusive use of the US dollar enhances the range of choice open to the country and its residents, in all international commerce, because such transactions are conducted in US dollars or in currencies that are convertible to US dollars.

“In contrast, with the Barbados dollars, you cannot buy or sell anything in nearby St Lucia, much less in the rest of the world. “In a world where payments and settlements are digitised, with no need for notes and coins, there is no limit on the commercial and financial sovereignty of holders of the US dollar.”

Monetary reform also involves a country’s Central Bank.

According to Ram T&T’s Central Bank, just like its economy, is also in need of reform.  “I don’t see the point of the Central Bank. There’s no point. That’s a real institutional burden with not much benefit.”

He suggested it be redesigned to address important measures like monetary policy.
However, while T&T’s economy is “much more” advanced than Barbados it still needs to continuously reform and improve its business environment to make it more enabling especially for entrepreneurs to bring their ideas to fruition.

Bravo! Why stop at the currency? CARICOM is doomed, as fat cat bureaucrats preside over starving citizens cowering in fear as criminals rampage with impunity and the murder toll mounts. USA can acquire the 113 million acres of real estate and end the agony of “independence”. Decolonisers, the Caribbean Reparation Commission and the UWI CRR all squander public funds that can educate all races in a cosmopolitan community. Racists seeking lookalikes can repatriate to AU domiciles of origin and demand reparation from descendants of venal chiefs who sold their captives. All overseas embassies can be closed and ex- colonies can remain in the Commonwealth while enjoying US security. and inestment in economic projects to develop the regional economy. Discussion with the UK Foreign Office can create a suitable status that would keep membership of the Commonwealth for unincorporated Territories of the USA. This is the de facto status which will achieve protection from totalitarian tyrants brandishing nuclear weapons, creating debt and threatening neighbours. It will also reduce UN paralysis from numerous small states demanding aid and dominating sessions. Corrupt CARICOM regimes can be retired and pliable Presidents abolished to save funds.

Independence was the greatest con trick since emancipation, a racist racket to swindle British Indians and replace their UK citizenship with a scheming Ponzi scam to dominate minorities who lack trust in CCJ and prefer the imperial Privy Council to protect them from belligerent bigots. driven by racial envy.

 

 

Trinidad agro-processors seek Guyanese partners

August 4, 2022

George Singh, left, Minister of Rural Development and Local Government Faris Al-Rawi, centre, and Minister in the Ministry of Agriculture, Land and Fisheries Avinash Singh look at a display of hydroponic plants by Plant Doctors HydroAqua at the Agriculture & Food Expo at the Gulf City Shopping Complex, La Romain, yesterday.

 

Food shortages exacerbated by the COVID pandemic and the Russian/Ukraine war, spurred Minister of Local Government Faris Al-Rawi to form partnerships with Guyana as part of its food sustainability strategies.  Speaking at the launch of the Food and Agriculture expo at the Gulf City Shopping Complex yesterday, Al- Rawi said President Dr Mohammed Irfaan Ali will be coming to T&T on August 17 to engage in talks.

“It’s time to dream. Money does grow on trees, it’s called agriculture. Corporate initiatives do exist.

The Prime Minister has led the charge in regional integration, which is why the President of Guyana will be here on the 17th of August to ensure that the land space of Guyana is available to the whole of Caricom.”  He said providing food sustainability and import substitution is no longer just talk.

“Having spent seven years passing laws of this country, I can vouch that agriculture in this country is 100 per cent tax-free. The incentives do exist,” he said.

He praised Southex Promotions, the T&T Chamber and the Supermarket Association for hosting the expo to provide opportunities for agricultural entrepreneurs.Meanwhile, T&T Chamber president Charles Pashley said food security has taken centre stage in the global discussion.

“I think we have to recognise that even as we discuss food security, we must know that it requires a long-term investment in research and development, as well as varied infrastructural works and a commitment by the stakeholders—private sector and government,” Pashley said.

According to an online publication from Knoema, Pashley said agricultural land area in Trinidad and Tobago “fell gradually from 980 square kilometres in 1969 to 540 square kilometres in 2018.”

“Preservation of our remaining agricultural land for agricultural purposes ought to be recognised as an important part of our national development agenda. Happily, technological advances have made high-yield, small-space farming and processing possible and we can now maximise this,” he added.

Entrepreneurs recognised the sector’s potential and there are now more private sector investments.

“Just recently, Guyana’s Vice President, referring to Caricom’s goal of increasing agricultural output by US$1.5 billion by 2025, estimated that US$7.5 billion more in private sector investment is required if the region is to reach that target,” he said.

Deodath Ramjattan, chief executive officer of Plant Doctors HydroAqua Limited, said the Guyanese partnership was a welcomed initiative.

“The soil right now has many diseases and nutrition quality is depleted over the years. We are using a lot of organic materials now, so things are growing naturally,” he said.

Ramjattan has trained hundreds of farmers over the years in new agricultural techniques.

“When we get the initiative with Guyana, we are thinking about using the rice hull, and the sugar cane bagasse to make a soil putting it together in blocks and selling to farmers and householders so they can grow their food organically.”

Minister in the Ministry of Agriculture Avinash Singh said regional integration was high on the Government’s agricultural agenda as it relates to Caribbean food security.

“Based on the talks we held at the last visit, Guyana is making land space available for our feed processors to get raw materials to create the feed. It doesn’t make sense for us to get raw materials from far countries when right here from our Caricom neighbour, we can get raw materials to create feeds.” The T&T delegation had the opportunity to see the genetic material grown with wheat and the corn trials and these were very promising.

The expo has 40 booths and will end with a farmers’ market.

Following decades of neglect and decline, farmers expect governments to respond to their demands and contribute to the rejuvenation of public services, inhibited by a heavy-hand state-centric approach, which limited gains and generated political tensions.

 

Barbados

Wello and BIDC 5 MW wave energy farm

09 Aug 2022

Finnish wave technology provider Wello and the Barbadian Barbados Investment and Development Corporation (BIDC) (now Export Barbados (BIDC)) signed an agreement for deployment of a 5 MW wave energy farm.

Export Barbados (BIDC) is an agency of the Barbados Government, whose mandate is to contribute to the diversification and growth of its local economy through new investment, increased exports, and employment creation by fostering the development of competitive business enterprises.

Wello is a Finnish company with over a decade of experience in wave energy conversion technology. Their unique way of capturing wave energy by their technology, The Penguin, is by way of a floating vessel which captures the waves’ rotational power and converts it into clean ocean energy. Wello has already deployed projects in various locations in Europe, in Scotland, the Canary Islands, the Basque country and now the technology will be making its way to the Caribbean.

In November Wello visited Barbados to review different locations where the wave site could be deployed and selected Consett Bay. The project will commence immediately. Wello and BIDC want to see wave energy deployed as soon as possible. Barbados and the Caribbean Basin have high wave energy generation capabilities, with continuous and stable energy production on a yearly basis.

Barbados is ahead of the curve by having an ambitious target of becoming carbon neutral by 2030. This goal is much needed and for such a target to be reached there is a great need to diversify the energy mix. Wave energy is one of the most important new sources of renewable energy. 10% of the world’s energy can be extracted from ocean waves. That is a significant addition to the renewables palette once abandoning fossil energies. Wave energy will add stability to production of renewables; wind and solar are very variable in nature. Together these sources will result in stable energy production requiring minimal amounts of energy storage or back-up sources.

Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Export Barbados, Mark Hill is excited at the prospect of leading the charge for a new clean energy source for Barbados. “We are increasingly aware that our oceans are a latent yet vast resource that can significantly contribute to the economic development of the country, particularly now in a climate that necessitates innovation and economic diversification for survival.”

Heikki Paakkinen, CEO of Wello agrees – ‘It is a logical choice for an openminded and progressive island nation to choose wave energy. Waves are the greatest resource of islands constantly available and free of charge. Waves’ energy can be harnessed in harmony with nature not disturbing the scenery either. It is the most economical choice in the long run as well.’

The wave power park will be 5 MW in nominal power in the beginning. There is a plan and an option to extend up to 50 MW feeding the power into a hydrogen production plant. In addition to this Barbados is aiming to become a hub of wave energy technology providing their manufacturing and services based on Wello’s technology to neighbouring countries and islands.

Source: Wello

 

Broke Barbados begs for survival strategy

Abrahm Lustgarten July 27 2022

July 27, 5 a.m. EDT

Environment

Barbados Resists Climate Colonialism in an Effort to Survive the Costs of Global Warming
Across the Caribbean, soaring national debt is a hidden but decisive aspect of the climate crisis, hobbling countries’ ability to protect themselves from disaster. One island’s leader is fighting to find a way out.

Co-published with The New York Times Magazine (Edited)

Late on May 31, 2018, five days after she was sworn in as prime minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley and her top advisers gathered in her administrative office in Bridgetown, for a call that could determine the fate of her island, amid framed posters of windmills and sugar cane fields. Mottley, then 52, can appear mischievous before her bluntest declarations, but on this evening her steely side showed. She placed her personal cellphone on speaker and dialed a number in Washington for the International Monetary Fund. As arranged, Christine Lagarde, the managing director, answered

Mottley got to the point: Barbados was out of money. It was so broke that it was taking out new loans just to pay the interest on the old ones, even as its infrastructure was coming undone. Soon it would have to declare itself insolvent, instigating a battle with the banks and creditors that held its $8 billion in debt and triggering austerity measures that would spiral the island into further poverty. There was another way, Mottley said, but she needed Lagarde’s help.

Mottley, the first woman to lead Barbados, had been working toward this conversation for nearly two years, consulting expert financial and legal advisers to develop a plan that would restructure the soaring debts in a way that would free up money to invest in the ’ economy. Then, nine months before voting day, that plan took on new urgency as two powerful hurricanes ripped through the Caribbean 12 days apart; they missed Barbados, but one obliterated nearby Dominica.

In Mottley’s view, that was “like a nuclear event.” The storms revealed that even the most heroic economic planning could be laid to waste in a moment. It was already obvious that every climate crisis was an economic crisis; but going forward,every economic crisis would effectively be a climate crisis. For Mottley, this meant the money she needed the IMF to help her recoup wasn’t just for her people’s prosperity but for their survival.

Mottley’s insistence on speaking directly with Lagarde — she had been pushing for the meeting for nearly a week while Lagarde’s office demurred — was an unorthodox way to approach the leader of one of the world’s dominant economic institutions. Descended from two generations of politicians, Mottley had learned that important decisions at large organizations are made at the top. Her grandfather was the mayor of Bridgetown; her father served as the country’s consul general to the United States. She was groomed at the island’s elite girls’ academy, Queen’s College and at the private United Nations International School in New York.

Beside her in the anteroom was her adviser Avinash Persaud, a close friend since the days when they studied at the London School of Economics, where she received her law degree in 1986. Persaud, who went on to lead research departments at J.P. Morgan and State Street Bank, was deeply knowledgeable about development finance. The two friends were joined by the principals of London financial firm, White Oak Advisory — Sebastian Espinosa and David Nagoski — debt experts who had developed a novel contractual clause to protect countries from economic consequences of climate catastrophes.

With Lagarde on the phone, Mottley made her pitch. Barbados was going to default on the debt it owed to private banks and investors. She wanted Lagarde’s support in persuading them to renegotiate its terms. The IMF is both the assessor and the enforcer of global economic policy, the de facto gatekeeper to the world’s capital markets. Mottley knew that banks and investors would work with her only if Barbados were participating in a formal IMF program for economic reform — and it had to start immediately.

Mottley told Lagarde that Barbados was prepared to do voluntarily what most countries have to be coerced to do: cut its budget and raise taxes. But she needed something in return. With the effects of climate change bearing down on the region, the kind of austerity the IMF demanded from developing nations — slashing the size of government agencies and firing public employees while auctioning off real estate and other national assets — would no longer work. Mottley wanted Lagarde to endorse an economic program that would still allow her to raise salaries of civil servants, build schools and improve piping and wiring for water and power.

“Before you carry people on a long journey,” she told Lagarde, “you have to give them a little breakfast.”

Barbados, considered relatively wealthy by World Bank standards, hadn’t been able to borrow on the international market since 2013 and it had no capacity to pay for essential programs and projects. The concern was immediate. Hurricane season was about to begin. No one was sure how Lagarde would respond. Would she trust Mottley to spend on Barbados first? Or demand — as the IMF usually did — deference to debtors? Then, came the director’s surprising reply: She was extremely supportive of what Mottley was proposing.

Mottley declared that Barbados would stop making its payments on its debts. “Today, my friends, we pry off the hands that have been strangling us.“

Some of the business leaders she had gathered to stand behind her at the lectern winced. The value of Barbados’ bonds on the global markets crashed. S&P Global downgraded the island’s credit. Barbados teetered on the edge of financial chaos as Mottley’s adventure onto the global stage of financial and climate activism began.

What Mottley sought would not be easy. She would have to untangle the relationships connecting the IMF with the financial institutions that invest in countries like Barbados — a global financial system that simultaneously helps and preys upon countries at their moments of greatest need. She would have to challenge the rules of that system and its powerful figures, who often struggle to recognize how climate change is altering the traditional dynamics of debt and development. Mottley would come to see the traps of that system as fundamentally unjust. Investors in former imperial powers now squeezed former territories for assets, for access to markets, for interest on loans. And she would have to contend with all of that waiting for the next storm, knowing she governed a dot of land isolated in one of the most vulnerable places on Earth.

Every summer, the warm waters off the northwest coast of Africa spin off cyclonic systems that hurtle across the Atlantic, reaching the easternmost islands — where Barbados stands sentinel. Quick successions like that of the two storms that missed the island, were supposed to be rare. Now, though, experts believe strong hurricanes will become an annual near-certainty.

Longer and drier, droughts threaten drinking-water supplies and hinder growing food. Barbados, with 290,000 people, is among the half of Caribbean islands the U N already describes as water-scarce with seawater seeping into its aquifers and rainfall that might drop by as much as 40% by the end of the century. Droughts will lead to wildfires, killing more vegetation and crops. Heavy rain causes precipitous landslides, which wipe out roads, rip up electrical grids and cut off energy supplies. Rising and warming seas are eroding shorelines and killing reefs and fisheries. According to the IMF, roughly two-thirds of the 511 disasters to hit small countries since 1950 have occurred in the Caribbean, taking over 250,000 lives.

The islands also carry more debt, relative to the size of their economies, than almost anywhere else, a fiscal burden that makes it virtually impossible for them to pay for infrastructure to protect them. Barbados, which in 2017 had the third-highest debt per capita of any country, was spending 55% of its gross domestic product each year to repay debts, much of it to foreign banks and investors, while spending under 5% on environment and and health care.

This is true beyond the Caribbean Rising sovereign debt is becoming a hidden but decisive aspect of the climate crisis. According to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, external debt for Small Island Developing States, SIDS, more than doubled between 2008 and 2021. The IMF projected that three-quarters of emerging-market economies would pay a third or more of their tax revenue on debt service in 2021. In the zero-sum game of budgets, that means less money for shoring up crumbling infrastructure. Analysis by Eurodad, the European debt-and-finance advocacy organization, found that over the last six years, Latin American and Caribbean countries have slashed what they pay on anything non-debt-related by 22%.

As Mottley explained , “We always have to put aside debt money first.”

Jamaica’s debt, can be tied to the response to Hurricane Gilbert more than three decades ago. Grenada’s is in part because of Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Dominica’s 2017 loss relative to GDP, was the equivalent of a $44 trillion hit to the U.S. economy.

According to the World Bank, these damages have made it difficult for the Caribbean economies to achieve anything resembling healthy growth. Since 1980, the cumulative cost of disasters has amounted to more than half of a year’s worth of total economic product for 14 Caribbean nations. The costs have eclipsed average annual GDP growth in five of them. There are poor countries with more debt, and there are island countries in the Pacific facing more imminent climate threats, but nowhere in the world do the debt and climate vulnerabilities overlap to the extent they do in the Caribbean.

Fixing the debt crisis, as Persaud says, “isn’t about countries mopping up their fiscal discipline. It is that countries on the front line face a different kind of risk. They face wipeout risk.”

The IMF could buffer this crisis in its mission. The IMF was formed in 1944 when the soon-to-be victors of World War II met at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, to build a new economic system for a world devastated by war and depression. Its mandate: to stabilize global markets and keep currencies — and debts — predictable. Today 190 member countries pay dues into a pool from which they can borrow in a crisis.

On balance, the IMF and the World Bank have served their primary function well, steadying economies and offering the reassurance of economic leadership to global markets over many decades. The Fund also became a conduit by which global capital, and the mixed blessings that come with it, flow to poor nations. Its advisers are the people who dictate the often-painful recalibrations a country must take to return to economic recovery and regain market trust. It has become one of the most influential, if underappreciated, determiners of climate policy in the world.

The IMF doesn’t lend much money directly — that’s the job of the World Bank and other development banks — and it doesn’t negotiate between a country and its creditors. But it does draw the boundaries of possibility and policy, and its stamp of approval is an essential prerequisite for other investors, banks and ratings agencies to encourage new projects or lend more money. Should those private contracts fail, the bankers and other buyers know that to some degree, the great international finance institutions stand by ready to help make them whole. An indebted developing country is paralyzed and ostracized without the IMF’s stamp of approval, which gains it access to the world’s capital markets. And that approval is conditioned on fiscal changes that can carve deeply into the bone of civil society.

For her entire life, Mottley watched Barbados painstakingly build itself up as a postcolonial democracy. The big institutions capable of aiding Caribbean countries,  leaned too heavily on outdated assumptions and equations. The IMF requires countries to perform within its framework but only recently began to fold some nominal climate risk into its calculations. It continues to hold countries to metrics for success — primarily the ability to keep the ratio of total debt to annual GDP quite low — that many economists say are unrealistic and arbitrary. The IMF has held steadfastly to its doctrine for years, based on its studies of how larger economies, not small ones, function. But a doctrine that demands austerity often only increases a country’s vulnerability to climate threats.

“There’s an orthodoxy as to what is acceptable, and what can be sustained,” Mottley said.

By declaring nations like Barbados too rich to qualify for development aid, the World Bank — which effectively puts IMF policy into practice — has relegated them to economic purgatory. The bank has folded climate risk into a range of climate-related aid and disaster-finance programs, but it still does not formally consider a country’s specific climate risk when it evaluates eligibility for its discounted development loans. Then, by failing to fully account for how the exceptional costs of climate change affect national wealth, the IMF and the World Bank have wound up driving countries in need toward profit-reaping hedge funds and banks, to borrow billions of dollars, often at credit-card-like interest rates.

Throughout, the debts have been collected, as the shadow of the 2008 financial crisis lingered and as a pandemic decimated tenuous health care systems and tourist-reliant economies.

Mottley’s ascent seemed inevitable to some Barbadians — one friend said that at 12, she promised she would be prime minister. Even after she earned her law degree at 21, her father urged her toward private practice. Why would Mia, oldest of four siblings, who loved music want to wade into the island’s internecine politics? “Horses for courses,” Mottley said, suggesting that everyone has a purpose in life. As prime minister, she is often seen at food trucks and is known as Mia to cabdrivers and reporters. Mottley was first elected to Barbados’ Parliament in 1994. She was the youngest Barbadian ever appointed to a ministerial position and has served as both attorney general and minister of economic affairs. Since 2008, shes twice headed the Barbados Labour Party. Her 2018 election was a landslide, with the party taking all 30 seats in the lower Parliament.

One of her great regrets was not being around to fight for independence in 1966. The first prime minister, Errol Barrow, was a family friend, and Mottley shared his belief that it was the responsibility of the government to use its resources to lift up, educate and house its citizens. The stakes for the Caribbean are still high and the dynamics the same: The region’s 45 million people have little voice and are easy to forget and as the Caribbean becomes increasingly unlivable, it could be a source of potential destabilization — and mass migration — at America’s door.

For at least a decade before Mottley was elected, poor management and corruption eroded the economy. As former central bank governor DeLisle Worrell described it, the country had developed a “dysfunctional” fiscal culture in which government agencies and departments took loans and negotiated deals without consulting the central bank, accumulating sprawling debt and a backlog of need. On the tourist end of the island, sewage erupted from neglected pipes as funding to fix them lagged. The response was to print more money and borrow more from abroad, to stanch the economic bleeding. In 2013, during Worrell’s term, Barbados took one of the largest commercial loans in its history — $150 million — from Credit Suisse at 7% interest; within a year, it had grown to $225 million, and by 2018, the interest on the balance was 12%. The money didn’t last, and the sewer lines weren’t fixed. It would be the last commercial loan Barbados could get. Running a consistent deficit, the country began drawing down its foreign reserves to service the loans. By the time of the 2018 election, the government was nearly broke, its reserves having dwindled to enough for just 28 days.

The people did not choose Mottley — or her Barbados Labour Party — over its rival by a margin of 3-to-1 because their political philosophies were different. They were both center left. Nor was the vote driven by people thinking Mottley would challenge the global finance system or solve climate change. The vote was for fiscal competence. As Mottley plotted how to escape the fiscal spiral, she met European climate scientists who helped bring into focus how everything from the housing stock to its coral reefs would determine how habitable Barbados would be in the future. Along with restructuring debt, Mottley laid out a plan, Roofs to Reefs, to restore the physical and ecological infrastructure. But it was going to take money Mottley thought she could work her way to the heights of global finance to gather that money.

The IMF’s education began with Hurricane Ivan in 2004. Heading for Barbados it veered south to Grenada, another former British colony, as a Category 3 storm; damaging most of the structures on the island, including 73 of 75 schools, four-fifths of the power grid and most of its nutmeg trees, eliminating a key export for years. Total damages topped $800 million. World Bank disbursed $20 million . Grenada, heavily indebted before the storm, plunged into a deep recession. In December 2004, it missed its first payment, entering what Standard & Poor’s termed “selective default.” Then, seven months later, another hurricane struck.

In the IMF view Grenada could not sustain its debts and that judgment gave cover for the country to renegotiate with the banks and foreign governments that it owed. The IMF’s assessment came at the usual price, though. Grenada agreed to slash its federal payroll — the government was the largest employer — divest assets and privatize agencies, toward the goal of reducing its debt.

As the IMF sees it, reducing debt is the recipe for financial stability. But stability also requires enormous spending. Grenada needed sea walls to protect its towns against ocean surges and retaining walls to keep its mountainous roads from collapsing. It needed to harden the country for worse storms and droughts to come. Immediately after Ivan, it needed a place to send its children and its sick. So the government spent a part of its budget on new schools, hospitals and roads. When Grenada missed its fiscal targets, the IMF instead blamed the “capital expenditure overruns” for its “fiscal slippages.” From then on, according to a 2007 staff report, the IMF wanted Grenada to pay off its debts to outside investors first.

“The IMF always blames the countries,” says Timothy Antoine, director of the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank and Grenada’s permanent secretary in the Ministry of Finance during the hurricanes.

Focusing on debt alone was “absolutely ludicrous,” a sign that the fund was still unprepared to acknowledge the extreme effect that a catastrophic event had on finances. Grenada had cut its budget and increased its revenues but watched its economy crumble and its poverty explode anyway. Lack of fiscal discipline alone could not account for the troubles and it wanted the support of the most powerful global institutions in finding a solution.

Over time, the IMF did begin to recognize the importance of preparing for the economic shock that climatic changes could bring — by 2014, several of its Grenada reports mentioned it. Still, connecting the risk to the consequence of default appears to have been too great a leap. Climate change was not even identified as a cause or risk factor when the IMF released its post-mortem on Grenada’s restructuring in 2017, suggesting that it had few methods for quantifying how environmental pressures might affect debt or the pace of its repayment. What was discussed was political instability and rising interest rates, not faltering agricultural exports or rising heat.

“They only have a hammer,” says Daniel Munevar, a former senior analyst for Eurodad now with the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development.

In June 2014, as Grenada again approached insolvency, Antoine gathered civic and religious leaders to plot a different approach. Leaders wanted a mechanism that could protect them against repeating the same fate when another climate catastrophe hit. But IMF staff were unsure how to put a value on the chance of a catastrophe and how to measure something that hadn’t even happened yet. A breakthrough came from White Oak Advisory — the consultants Grenada had hired.

Espinosa, the co-founder, had long seen how wealthy countries pushed exotic insurance products as the fix to protect against high risk. But it occurred to him that insurance, designed to protect against unlikely calamities, was a poor match for the grim certainties of the climate crisis. He thought instead about how debt and equity contracts often have triggers that change the terms when parties aren’t confident about their risk. What if debt relief were to be triggered by a storm? It could guarantee that Grenada would be protected when the next climate catastrophe arrived. White Oak constructed a contract clause that would automatically grant Grenada a reprieve from payments on much of its commercial debt if another hurricane hit the island, introducing a new tool for managing sovereign debt crises in a climate-plagued region.

As Mottley began to shepherd Barbados through its own insolvency, Grenada’s experience taught her that success would depend on her ability to use the IMF to her advantage. If she failed, Barbados risked being recolonized, this time financially. Moreover, when it came to facing off against creditors, Mottley didn’t just want a discount on her debts. She wanted the one thing she’d learned would begin to make her public debt resilient to the shocks of climate change — Barbados’ own hurricane clause.

After Mottley announced that Barbados would default on its debts, the IMF wasn’t the main obstacle to restructuring them; instead, it was the financial institutions that held the debts. It might stand as a mystery how anyone thinks he or she can make money off the tribulations of a group of tiny countries. Before, it was risky commodity ventures that made great fortunes. Now it is increasingly the risk itself. Traffickers in debt offer money that is desperately needed. By taking on the risk that these tiny nations will default, they profit handsomely — and if the risk gets to be too high, they can pass the debt on at a discount to more adventurous investors. That’s the nature of finance. But the climate crisis is raising the risks considerably, and in so doing, it is once again binding the destiny of these fragile nations to the speculative will of faraway powers.

When in 2018 Mottley told creditors that she did not intend to pay them, she and her team had a plan. Barbados owed approximately $8 billion, much of it to Barbadian banks owned by Canadian institutions like Scotiabank and CIBC, but nearly $1 billion of the total was owed to global financial firms, including Credit Suisse, investment-management firm Pimco and a Morgan Stanley subsidiary Eaton Vance. Her goal — drawn up in collaboration with the IMF — was to reduce total debt load by a third within 15 years. She needed to persuade her creditors to take what’s known as “a haircut,” reducing what they were owed, in this case by roughly a third. The old bonds would be exchanged for new ones at a lower interest rate. It was essential that a hurricane clause be included.

On the other side of the negotiations was an investment manager out of Boston named Federico Sequeda. A portfolio manager in emerging markets for Eaton Vance, Sequeda was accustomed to buying sovereign-debt stakes in places like Vietnam and Brazil. The mutual funds he oversaw held large positions in Barbados bonds. Sequeda would take umbrage at the suggestion that emerging-markets investors are predatory. Clearly, these developing countries need capital to function, he points out. Nobody is willing to donate that capital, and so accessing it — just like every other service purchased in the world — comes at a price. Ideally, there is sufficient transparency of motive and transaction so that the exchange can be a win for both sides.

In the run-up to Mottley’s election, Sequeda met her and Worrell, the former central bank chief, to get a pulse on the changes foreign investors could expect should she be elected. He was caught off guard by the sweep of Mottley’s plan and her determination to execute it. The creditors thought that Barbados could pay more and that it was using the IMF’s cooperation to leverage lower payments. They were neither versed in nor particularly concerned with climate change as a unique risk to their investments. The notion that a hurricane clause might be imposed on funds that firms sold to their clients as less volatile than other investments was untenable.

Sequeda didn’t think climate change — or the invention of a debt instrument to address it — was his business or responsibility. “We’re not really set up to analyze the probability of a climate-type risk taking place, and we don’t really think we’re actually the investors who want to be taking on that risk.”

The problem was that Sequeda and others already had huge exposure to climate risk. Commercial banks and private investors now hold approximately $54 trillion, or more than half, of the total global sovereign debt in emerging markets, linking themselves to the fate of the poorest countries in what the Institute of International Finance warns is “a vicious circle of interdependency.”

Complicating matters is that only part of that total debt is publicly known. Bloomberg records, for example, show that before Mottley’s default, Barbados had at least 30 outstanding bonds and loans worth more than $1 billion, at interest rates as high as 12%. Eurodad examined another financial trading database for The New York Times, looking at bonds in Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Belize and Suriname — four countries with bonds issued in U.S. or European currencies — and found foreign commercial debt worth nearly $10 billion. The records show that almost every major bank and investment house has a stake in these countries. BlackRock held $840 million in Dominican bonds as of January 2021. Goldman Sachs, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Citigroup have all held bonds in the countries, some at exorbitant interest rates. Jamaica recently owed some $208 million to J.P. Morgan Chase at 11.6%.

This is only a glimpse of a bigger and murkier picture. Eurodad researchers estimate that about 75% of holdings is private debt that cannot be identified. It is obscured by the contracts that funds and equity groups make with governments, which are not required to be disclosed. Persaud said even governments aren’t sure to whom they are beholden.

Or, as one sovereign-debt lawyer said, the only reliable way to identify the holders of bonds is to stop paying.

The lack of transparency raises fundamental questions about the fairness of default negotiations and the inability of the people most endangered by the debt-climate collision to hold their governments and their creditors accountable. Creditors can sue countries but countries have difficulty suing back, leaving citizens even more exposed. Over the past two decades, half of sovereign debt restructurings have led to litigation, often forcing higher payments than a country can afford.

The most aggressive litigators are found within hedge-fund investors, sometimes called vulture funds, that wait for the most vulnerable moment to buy distressed debt cheaply and then flip it for a profit, often by resisting restructuring or renegotiation. In 2008, NML Capital, a subsidiary of Elliott Management, a hedge fund, bought a discounted stake in Argentina’s pre-default debt and then pursued a relentless legal strategy for repayment — at one point having an Argentine Navy ship seized off the coast of Ghana. It earned its money back when Argentina issued a new bond deal. Aurelius Capital Management similarly bought up Puerto Rico’s debt, then argued in court that the island had to repay the fund before it could finance other projects, including hurricane preparedness. That case was dismissed.

In late 2018, Persaud received an email stating that Connecticut hedge fund Greylock Capital had bought an undisclosed portion of Barbados’ debt, and with it, a seat at the table among its creditors. The email warned that “they could take us to court.” But Greylock’s interest offered an opportunity. A distressed-debt fund also doesn’t need to recoup the same value that Sequeda did to make its profit, because it bought the bonds for a lower cost. Greylock might be able to drive down Sequeda’s price, helping Mottley get the terms she wanted.

The disaster clause Mottley sought was a sticking point. Her team would write up a lengthy proposal, always with a natural-disaster clause among demands. The creditors’ committee routinely would remove it. Mottley, patient, held out.

The clause White Oak designed wouldn’t reduce Barbados’ debt directly. But by suspending payments, it provided immediate access to funds in the aftermath of a calamity and shifted payment to the back end of the term. It would avoid disorderly default and keep Barbados, in the event of a catastrophe, at the table. The investors didn’t buy it. Some sharpened their tactics, telling reporters that Barbados was slow-walking its economic repair. The Financial Times reported that some creditors found White Oak’s $27 million fee to be “absurd.” Then, Sequeda and the creditors’ committee went to Washington and lobbied the IMF, demanding that it require Barbados to set aside a larger annual surplus — in essence, to free more cash to repay its debt faster.

The IMF maintains it kept the creditors at arm’s length. According to Persaud, its mission chief on the Barbados deal, Bert van Selm, grew impatient for the government to settle — even if it meant the hurricane clause would be lost. “I said, ‘Bert, are you trying to pressure us into a debt restructuring?’” Persaud said. van Selm replied that the IMF needed the restructuring to be finished. Alejandro Werner, though, the IMF’s former director for the Western Hemisphere, is more direct about what occurred. For months he struggled to keep the IMF’s internal departments aligned so that Barbados’ program could succeed. But the more Mottley delayed, the more the pieces threatened to come apart.

Some of the IMF staff thought Barbados was “being very obnoxious in asking for the natural-disaster clause. Everybody was ‘OK, we’re so close. Let’s just close.’”

In early 2019, with the negotiations at an impasse, Persaud flew to New York for a private meeting with Sequeda. For nearly a year, the two sides had been in a stalemate. In person it was different. Sequeda, who was unyielding in previous meetings, softened. His father-in-law and Persaud’s father were both from Guyana. Persaud, once a Wall Street executive himself, could talk Sequeda’s talk. Sequeda wanted to make sure the new bonds would be large enough for him to easily sell his stake later on — something made more likely if the bond met the $500 million threshold to be listed on the J.P. Morgan emerging-market index. Persaud wanted the disaster clause. “He kept saying liquidity. I kept saying disaster clause.”

A few months later, the agreement was signed. There would be a fund of roughly $530 million. Barbados received a 26% reduction in its debt, enough to temporarily drop its interest payments from 7% of its economy to 3% and free up more than $500 million a year. And it received its disaster protection, making Barbados the largest issuer of bonds with hurricane clauses in the world.

It was a tremendous victory for Mottley and Persaud, but soon afterward COVID-19 pandemic struck and a modest storm hit the country. The July 2, 2021, forecast was for blustery rains, but not extreme by Caribbean standards. Three years after Mottley identified climate change as Barbados’ preeminent threat, and three years into her effort to restructure its economy to better prepare for that threat, the country still hadn’t been able to address one of its highest priorities: shoring up vulnerable housing. Storm Elsa, which barely ranked as a Category 1 hurricane, happened to fall just short of the catastrophe level that would trigger hurricane debt relief. It was, however, the kind of routine challenge the government should be able to withstand.

The dollars that might have saved homes were instead used to amass a surplus that the government had promised the IMF. Mottley had reduced the public work force and raised taxes to ballast the government’s balance sheet. All of this was done for the sake of two metrics by which the IMF still judged a country’s success: How much savings could the government set aside, and how quickly could it reduce the ratio of its debt to its GDP?  To critics like Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research, these metrics weren’t fit to the task, and meeting them was proving to be more than Barbados could bear.

Barbados agreed to produce a surplus of 6% of its GDP each year. Because government revenues from taxes and fees were dependent on how well the economy performed, this assumed that it would grow at a rate it had not in years, if ever, an expectation that economists described as unrealistic, even cruel. Van Selm, the IMF’s mission chief for Barbados at the time, defends the number. “It can be done.” The IMF held Barbados to its second critical measure: It would have to use much of that surplus to slash its debt levels until the debt made up just 60% of GDP.

These are metrics that looked great in the textbooks of global economics schools in the 1960s, but they are not the measure by which the ruling economies of the world are judged today. Japan’s economy is doing fine with a debt ratio of 258% and the United States has a ratio of 150% — both countries, Mottley said, that “did everything that they tell us traditionally not to do.” The 60% ratio, in particular, requires extreme austerity. “It’s a little bit of a matter of theology rather than economics,” Persaud said. He and many others believe that it’s not the total amount of debt that matters, but to whom it is owed and how much it costs to carry. Development aid, for example, is often delivered as extremely low-interest loans. Should that count the same as high-interest debts to hedge funds? “It’s become a fetish,” Persaud said.

As small nations accumulate substantial debt, it raises even larger questions. Should those countries be penalized again for carrying that debt on their balance sheets, even as investors profit from that debt? Should there not at least be an allowance in IMF policy that distinguishes between climate-caused expenses and other, normal governing expenses?

When she was elected, Mottley thought she could work within the IMF’s system — that it could be flexible enough to let her whittle away at the drastic needs her country faced. A year after the negotiations were complete, though, she was beginning to see this was an illusion. That was when the COVID pandemic kneecapped the tourism industry. Government revenues plummeted, the surplus flipped into a 2% deficit and its debt started to rise again. The IMF cut Barbados a break when the pandemic hit, lowering its surplus target, but only temporarily. As the free-fall continued into 2021, the IMF announced that it would soon push Barbados toward its 6% target surplus once again, with van Selm saying that he was “pretty sure that tourism in Barbados will bounce back.” If the IMF’s goal was to support Mottley in building resilience to shock — climate as well as economic — its policies seemed to be having the opposite effect. Insistence on building a surplus was instead putting Barbados in a holding pattern, effectively sidetracking climate priorities.

Why? One reason, according to current and former staff members was that some groups within the IMF still didn’t think that accounting for climate change was essential to their work. Lagarde, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was sympathetic to Mottley’s climate fears, says Mark Plant, a 24-year veteran of policymaking at the IMF who now runs a finance division at the Center for Global Development, but during her tenure the fund made few strides on the issue. Then, in 2019, Kristalina Georgieva, a Bulgarian environmental economist, came from the World Bank to direct the IMF. Climate issues were trending politically, “and so she has pushed it quite hard,” Plant said. The same year, Alejandro Werner and Krishna Srinivasan, then the IMF’s deputy director for the Western Hemisphere, wrote a policy paper that for the first time laid out a broad philosophy for incorporating climate risk into the fund’s analytical framework. It suggested that in the future the IMF should lead countries into considering climate costs and make its support conditioned on it. Implementing those intentions has proved complicated, though.

“The fund,” Plant says, is still “struggling to fund the right levers.”

One problem, according to Aldo Caliari, of Jubilee USA, an interfaith group active in development finance, is that the organization is still trying to build the staff and expertise it needs to grasp the fiscal impact of the climate threat. Sometimes, its efforts have appeared borderline disingenuous. A few years back the IMF began advising countries to build a climate reserve fund made up of roughly 1% of their GDP to help pay for disaster recovery. But that, say analysts of IMF policy like the U.N.’s Munevar, basically is asking struggling countries to not use money that they could spend to prevent a disaster — so that they can use it to mop up afterward instead. The IMF, through the official statements it offered for this article, says that climate change is “now in the DNA” of the institution and that it is acting aggressively on the issue.

“The IMF is a learning institution. We recognized the need for change in recent years and are moving fast on that journey.”

The fund points to the paper Srinivasan and Werner wrote in 2019, which called for new mechanisms, like the hurricane clauses Grenada and Barbados enacted, to create fiscal breathing room for countries to pay for climate impacts. It presented a vision for the future in which climate issues rise to such prominence within the organization that climate planning becomes a central criterion for IMF approval.

By 2022, the fund had made some headway. Among other efforts, it and the World Bank have both begun to help countries either self-insure against disaster or secure discounted institutional financing before a catastrophe. The two organizations are running a pilot program in six vulnerable countries to assess their policies. For low-income countries, the IMF now requires the economic shock of a disaster — though not the gradual and corrosive trends of climate change — to be considered in its analysis of debt. In April, the IMF announced the creation of a new, $45 billion resilience trust, some of which is likely to head to Barbados. Mottley says she has found the IMF increasingly attuned to her country’s needs.

In late 2020 Eurodad found little evidence that climate-change policies were rising to prominence within the IMF. Researchers examined 80 IMF programs around the world and found that climate was central to the fund’s assessment in only one country — Samoa. Critics and insiders both observe that a sense of urgency is still missing. “Eventually” the IMF will have to figure out how to better incorporate climate vulnerability. “I mean, we’re still advancing on that..” Werner said.

In January, I visited Persaud at his home. Much had happened in the previous few months. In November, Mottley announced that Barbados would overthrow Queen Elizabeth as the titular head of state and declare itself the world’s newest republic, then called for a snap election, which she won handily. The mood was light; the next day, a new government would swear allegiance to its own country for the first time.

Then Persaud returning to Barbados’ precarious future said, “We cannot do this just through debt, even if there were no limits. Nor could any country in the Caribbean — or, for that matter, any vulnerable country in the world — survive the climate crisis by borrowing more money. No amount of economic growth would ever be enough, either.“

The deeper he and Mottley got into their economic reeducation, the clearer it became that a just future for people in small, front-line countries would require a radical shift in how the IMF and the World Bank applied their resources.

For years, Persaud has been at Mottley’s side, answering midnight text messages, tuning her fiscal options, looking five chess moves ahead, innovating ways to fix the region’s fiscal crisis even as her star rose through international speeches and she worked to raise the issue of sovereign debt from an obscure cause to a global climate concern. When Mottley talks about economics, it’s partly her thinking — she is indisputably the boss and has a striking fluency in policy minutiae — but almost always partly his, too. He writes many of those speeches. If Mottley is the decisive leader, Persaud is the fount of possible solutions, churning out or delving into economic innovations he thinks might save the world.

There are the hurricane clauses, catastrophe bonds, “blue bonds” — which designate money just for ocean conservation — and a trendy new category called debt-for-climate swaps. The list goes on, Persaud said. The problem isn’t lack of ideas. It’s how to scale them so they can have measurable effects.Lately, he had been focused on a new plan that would draw on two pools of money. The IMF directly controls nearly $1 trillion worth of member reserves, which it can distribute to members using what it calls “special drawing rights” and mostly holds for some larger emergency. Surely the climate crisis counted as an emergency.

The IMF could use its internal drawing rights and expand the availability of 0% loans to help fund the kinds of adaptation efforts that the United Nations estimates will soon cost as much as $500 billion annually. Doing so would require changing a lot of rules, particularly about who qualifies for that funding and how it is earmarked. The IMF’s new Resiliency and Sustainability Trust — a catchall for everything from climate mitigation to pandemic costs — is a start, but only just that. “It’s about 10 times too small,” Persaud said.

Persaud’s plan has an even more costly and ambitious element: addressing mitigation, which Morgan Stanley estimates will cost $50 trillion globally over the next 27 years. IMF members hold $13 trillion in national reserves. Persaud proposes using 1% of that larger pool to seed an enormous new climate trust that would attract outside investment for emissions-slashing projects. The trust could make seed loans at a nominal interest rate and target those loans to specific development projects, keeping the debt off governments’ balance sheets — and excluded from debt-ratio calculations. Persaud thinks that funding could attract perhaps another $2.5 trillion in annual investments from banks and equity funds. That, finally, would be big money.

As expensive as these plans may sound, they are likely to save money and ultimately pay for themselves. According to Colin Young, executive director of the regional Caribbean Community Climate Change Center, for every dollar spent on climate resilience, six dollars are saved in recovery efforts. Not doing anything, researchers at Tufts University found, will allow costs to mount so much that they will subsume Caribbean economies even without the shock of devastating storms. By 2050, the researchers wrote, the costs of inaction will amount to 10% of the region’s total economic activity — a fiscal death sentence.

It is possible that none of the approaches that Persaud argues for will ever be enough. But the IMF is increasingly aware that the scale of the problem requires solutions that are antithetical to the old way of thinking. One person close to the IMF’s highest levels of policymaking said that some of the countries facing the most intense climate peril will never be able to pay back what they owe.

“They’re going to require complete debt forgiveness, and some bit of austerity around the edges is not going to change that. The order of magnitude of the problem is just too big.”

Persaud, like virtually everyone, is hesitant to talk about erasing sovereign debt. After all that Barbados has been through, he would still prefer to work within the global finance system. “I know we don’t want to create the moral hazard of giving away money for free,” he says. Besides, global institutions can forgive only their own loans. Because most of the debt is now held by commercial investors, it stands to reason that to receive relief from them, the development banks or other large economies would have to be willing to pay those investors back.

There is an argument to be made, though, that the loss of the money owed is a minimal price in the context of the profit that has been made and that there is justice to this form of mercy. BlackRock,  is now among the largest holders of Barbados’ publicly traded debt, having purchased large blocks of it once Sequeda and the creditors settled. Consider what BlackRock, which is also the largest global financier of the oil-and-gas industry, has earned from processes of climate warming.

Throughout the winter, the pressure mounted on Mottley. The IMF’s three-year program was drawing to a close, and the fund was still insisting that Barbados would have to swing back toward 6% budget surpluses by 2024 — or else it would lose access to promised funding, as well as the credibility that would allow it to borrow from markets in the future. The IMF announced this while Barbados’ economy continued to struggle and while COVID still raged, and so Mottley, perhaps approaching the end of her patience, raged too.

In four years, Mottley had become a leader for Caribbean countries, many with populations smaller than a midsize American city, all of which had to face these global institutional juggernauts by themselves.

In 2018, she excoriated the United Nations General Assembly — “For us, it is about saving lives. For others, it is about saving profits” — in a speech about the forgotten countries on the climate front lines. She spoke, in 2021, at the 26th annual U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, in which she accused the developed world of hypocrisy, asking, “When will our leaders lead?”

Since 2008, G20 nations had spent $25 trillion printing new money to juice their own stalling economies, money they could have used to prevent the worst of the climate crisis instead. That failure “will allow the path of greed and selfishness to sow the seeds of our common destruction,” she said. She left the conference holding hands with President Joe Biden.

All that access to leaders gave Barbados an advantage over other Caribbean countries — an advantage Mottley was happy to leverage but which meant that even Barbados’ modest successes might be unrealistic for its regional peers. “We are unequally yoked,” she said. If there was any consolation, it was that the IMF itself finally appeared to be attaching action on climate to its reputation. Thanks to Mottley’s efforts, Barbados had become a showcase for the IMF, a way to prove it could be agile on climate issues, too.

Barbados, though, was still being measured against the convention of its ratio of debt to GDP, which happened to be growing as the pandemic and war unsettled markets. How could the IMF still want the budget to swing back into surplus? “I can’t do these things if I have to spend money on augmenting water supply because of the climate crisis,” she said.

Suddenly it seemed as if all of it had become a treadmill exercise. The efforts to win a disaster clause that the Inter-American Development Bank has now made standard for its loans in the Caribbean. The deep thinking and brainstorming of bigger solutions. The climate swaps to exchange debt-service fees for ecological upgrades. Maybe her goal hadn’t been big enough. Maybe it wasn’t about finding more money in the current system but about changing the system. “I’m saying the same things over and over, over and over. You begin to feel as though you’re going crazy.”

In March, Mottley was scheduled to give a speech at the World Trade Organization. She has two rules for capitalizing on her high-profile public appearances:

• • • Always make a big ask and
    • never leave the podium without offering a solution.

Persaud set to writing the speech, but this time felt different. Neither he nor Mottley was confident that trade helped solve the big problems of the world. It seemed to make them worse.

There were no misgivings or hesitations about what she was preparing to deliver to the WTO. She and Persaud had decided to be blunt. The rest was a delicate balance. “She does not want to be put into a box,” Persaud said. “She does not want to be put in a female box, I don’t want her in a SIDS box, and we don’t want to be anti-West, because that’s not who we are.” Mottley read the speech the day before and read it again, absorbing it.

“My friends,” she began, with a nod to Director General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, “the global order is not working.” It does not deliver on peace or on prosperity or on stability, she said. The words of global partnerships were hollow, the partnerships themselves glib, corrupted by greed and selfishness and they remained fundamentally imbalanced. Debt is written off in Ukraine, as it was for Germany after World War II. Other countries, though, have seen their humanitarian crises ignored. Gone was the patient case-building, the appeals to logic and empathy, that characterized her recent speeches. “We have therefore to ask ourselves whether we can live in this global order.”

It was time to reset. The war in Ukraine was forcing that reset anyway. She could work with the global economic system to raise capital. She could probably find a strategy to bolster her island’s standing in the face of climate change, for a while. But combining both? It had proved impossible. It was time to use the IMF’s drawing rights, the hurricane clauses, all of it. And then Mottley laid out Persaud’s plan to establish a new climate trust based on the IMF’s reserves, her big ask.

But to make these changes, she warned, the world had to get to a new place in spirit. It had to fill some gaping moral cavity. “That we are more concerned with generating profits than saving people“is perhaps the greatest condemnation that can be made of our generation.”

:

President Ali in Washington

July 26, 2022

The region expects to reap major benefits and outcomes of the Guyana President’s visit to the United States as the two countries seek to bolster their relations in areas relating to development.

His Excellency, Dr Mohamed Ali is leading a delegation comprising Vice President, Dr Bharrat Jagdeo; Minister of Foreign Affairs , Hugh Todd and Foreign Secretary, Robert Persaud.

 The delegation engaged with l high-ranking US officials, including the Secretary of State to discuss issues to further deepen bilateral relations between Guyana and the United States. Senior Minister with responsibility for Finance Dr Ashni Singh explained that government attaches the highest level of importance to the visit.

“We anticipate .. very significant and substantial tangible outcomes… I can assure you that there are going to be very significant, demonstrable and tangible outcomes coming out of this visit”.

As “fringe elements” try to understate and trivialize the importance of the visit to the United States,   he added the visit had been planned shortly after Dr Ali became President in August 2020. Therefore, those making spurious claims about the visit are demonstrating their lack of familiarity with the nature of relationships between friendly sovereign states.

“All I will say is let us see how the visit evolves and let us see the outcomes that will emerge. We have no doubt whatsoever knowing the bilateral agenda that we share with the US. We in government know that this is a visit of the highest level of importance. Both administrations place tremendous importance to the visit.”

Guyana views the United States as a valued partner. Aside from the major role the US company ExxonMobil is playing in Guyana’s oil and gas sector, there is increasing interest by US investors in the country’s non-oil sectors.

“Even in other sectors, we are seeing growing interest by US based companies in Guyana’s remarkable economic potential in a number of sectors where it is agriculture, tourism and all of the non-oil productive sectors…”

The visit has tremendous strategic importance.

“…We see it as an opportunity to reaffirm on both sides our commitment to the highly valued partnership that we share with the United States and also to advance our shared strategic interest.”

President Ali during his visit continuously stressed the importance of the relationship between Guyana and the United States. Similar views were expressed by United States Secretary of State, Antony Blinken when he stated that “Guyana has been a very strong partner for the United States.”

This visit gives Guyana the opportunity to follow up on commitments made at the Summit of the Americas. The diplomatic relationship between Guyana and the USAs spans more than five decades.

 

 

Government policy formulation supports transformative agenda

July 26, 2022

Importance of US as strategic partner for Guyana and the Caribbean

He made the statement in a discussion at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars in Washington DC, moderated by Ambassador Thomas A. Shannon Jr, the incoming Co-Chair of the Brazil Institute Advisory Council and the Senior International Policy Advisor at Arnold &Porter.

“What this speaks to is policymaking, and we don’t give enough credit to the type of leadership, policy formulation and strategic type of work that was done to bring Guyana from the second-poorest country in the hemisphere to a position where we were the leading country in many areas, our housing programme became a study for the IDB, our economic model .. that speaks to sustainability.”

The President emphasised that the country has consistently demonstrated “good capability in policy formulation to navigate and manage through different phases of development”. This will be amplified given the type of revenue the country is set to earn from its oil and gas sector.

The objectives are stability and strategic development that focuses on developing the infrastructure and on building the country and economy in a multifaceted way while providing prosperity for its citizens.

The country could not have done this alone and one of its most important bilateral partners is the USA, an important partner to Guyana and the Caribbean region, from a developmental perspective and a societal perspective where the countries are connected culturally.

“There is no other connection that is greater than people-to-people connection, and you are home to the largest diaspora of Guyana, and we sometimes miss this point. We are not only connected through policymaking, through foreign policy, through economic connection, through private sector connection. We are connected through people. Our culture was brought here in the United States and now forms an important part of national life in the US.”

It is important that countries connected through strong bonds of people work closely together.

“Many people would look at this relationship and say maybe because of oil and gas, the US now is very much interested because of the private sector interests, but we don’t see it that way. We have always had a strong relationship with the US.”

He stressed the need for innovative policymaking decisions in the prevailing global environment.

“We, for example, are not only importing all the inflation that is happening globally, we are faced with a serious shipping issue, not only Guyana—the region. We are faced with input issues, fertiliser, the cost of fuel, and you have to create policy in this environment that people understand, and that also reflects the needs of people in the country.”

All of these factors have graduated policy making from a national perspective to a global one.

President Ali also lauded the recent Organisation of American States (OAS) Summit in Los Angeles and the commitment of the leaders that attended.

“The President of the United States and the Vice President and leading secretaries were there throughout the summit. The level of engagement was second to none, and for CARICOM, we had a very strategic and rewarding meeting with the leadership of the United States, including President Biden.”

President Ali highlighted Guyana’s leading role in fighting climate change with adevelopment agenda guided by its Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS).

“So the Low Carbon Development Strategy now as it is, 2030, is the overarching development strategy that will ensure we develop our country in a sustainable way, in a way that ensures the economy is resilient to different shocks, in a way that promotes equitable development, in a way that speaks to the transformative agenda of the Government where we are focusing on, how we will achieve human resource transformation, how we’ll build a mechanism in the education sector, the health sector, the housing sector, all the social sectors to support the infrastructure and economic transformation that will take place.”

President Ali met Ambassador Mark Green, President, Director, and CEO of the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars.

The Head of State was accompanied by Vice President, the Honourable Dr Bharrat Jagdeo; the Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the Honourable Hugh Todd and Guyana’s Ambassador to the United States of America, H.E Samuel Hinds.

 

 

New UWI Trinidad principal takes office

Aug 01 2022

New Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal for the St. Augustine Trinidad Campus of The University of the West Indies (The UWI), Professor Rose-Marie Belle Antoine, officially assumes office from today. She succeeds Professor Brian Copeland who proceeded into retirement on July 31, 2022.

Professor Antoine’s appointment as Campus Principal was announced at The UWI University Council meeting on April 29, 2022. Members of the highest governing and decision-making authority gathered for its annual review of the academy’s business affairs, operations and financial management and HR appointments.

Professor Rose-Marie Belle Antoine, whose last post was that of University Pro Vice-Chancellor of Graduate Studies and Research, was the inaugural Director and initiator of the successful Master of Law degree, UWI’s first multi-campus, hybrid delivery programme. She was the first sitting Dean of the Faculty of Law at the St. Augustine Campus where she was instrumental in shaping curriculum and introduced cutting-edge additions such as Oil & Gas Law, HIV, Banking, and Discrimination Law.

 

Principal’s philosophy: Implement, connect, build

Prof Rose-Marie Belle Antoine has a full philosophy to develop, sustain and harness the enthusiasm and capabilities of the UWI community.

After her appointment in May, Antoine became the first woman to hold the post. She stressed that her philosophy is not a vision.

“We talk about vision, but I think that word is overused. I’m about getting it done. Implementation. That’s my mantra. My main focus is to implement, because this university has a lot of brilliant people with lots of excellent ideas.”

Antoine isn’t concerned about whether or not she can impress or leave a legacy. Her target is on enhancing the university and improving the standard and delivery of education. By the end of her term she hopes to give life to the many stalled projects. For now, she is curious as to how the university will be transformed under her influence and passion.

Antoine is a Cambridge and Oxford scholar whose doctorate from Oxford is in offshore financial law. She entered UWI as a temporary law lecturer at the Barbados Cave Hill campus in 1989, then became a lecturer in 1991. Then she was appointed director and initiator of the Master of Law a multi-campus hybrid delivery programme.

Over the years, she held high-ranking positions, including law faculty dean and pro vice-chancellor of the Board for Graduate Studies and Research. As law faculty dean, Antoine was instrumental in creating the Makandal Daaga Scholarship, an equal-opportunity scholarship to support law students who are outstanding in and out of the classroom.

Now, as UWI principal, before diving into the heavy work, a rationalisation exercise among the UWI community is the first item on her agenda. From there on she will revisit incomplete and ongoing initiatives started by her predecessor, Prof Copeland.

“We are not going to just throw that aside. We have not gotten as far as we should with them but I would want to develop those further and use whatever skills I have to make them come to pass feasibly. Those are great objectives.”

She has a keen interest in pushing the idea of multidisciplinary education and developing agriculture.

“We are leaders. The entire region looks at us. One thing about it is the uniqueness of the St Augustine campus. It’s not just oil and gas – it’s agriculture. So we should be visible leaders in that dimension and we should be partnering with the government and NGOs and do more of it.”

She also hopes to tackle the tough issues of racism, human rights, equity in education and all aspects of social justice face-on.

“That is what I have done all my life and that is what I hope to do on a grander scale and to be more inclusive, starting with UWI family…I want to ensure we all know what we stand for and what we are working for, and I feel very optimistic.”

She wants UWI to recapture a connective voice with a different approach to have a stronger presence in the community.

“I stand for community engagement, I stand for human rights. I feel if you are grounded in the society, as I’d like us to be, certainly it has to be (with) a focus on issues that are important to the society now.”

Lamenting the large gap in the education system created by the covid19 pandemic, Antoine feels obligated to work with all stakeholders to ensure the generation affected by this can find a loophole to thrive.

“I am of the view there are many students out there who have had a dent in the education from online learning. Some may have done better.”

All her plans are in line with enhancing the quality of education and at the same time ensuring everyone has access to tertiary education.

“We want to be that buffer, I want to ensure that the many people who are struggling could still have access to university…Whatever we do, we should not alienate those people. I believe UWI has a responsibility to help with that process of the buffering. It’s part of our civic responsibility to ensure that when we do become more self-sustaining, which we have to be, that we are still accessible to those that need us.”

CARICOM welcomes the delayed drive for reviving Cinderella Agriculture, mainstay of the region for centuries, starved with paltry budgets from corrupt regimes, battered by notorious neglect of rural farms inundated with floods, paralysed by lack of irrigation in droughts, praedial larceny, abysmal infrastructure and intolerable insecurity amid rampaging crime. With a profitable fertiliser industry, fertile soil, ample rain and sunshine, a century of world-class research and technology, UWI can dissipate the decolonial zeitgeist underpinning sacrilege of heritage including vulgar parody of language at the heart of poor communication in media, caricature of cosmopolitan culture and dull academic performance.

 

The Bahamas

New  Bahamas Maritime  Museum  Now Open

Bob Curley

In a region defined by water, there are  few museums devoted to the importance of the sea to history, development and the lives of its people. The new Bahamas Maritime Museum dives deep into free diving, sunken treasure, piracy and the lives of sailors at sea in Freeport, Bahamas. Funded by Carl Allen, a sports fishing enthusiast who isredeveloping the fishing resort of Walker’s Cay, northeast of Grand Bahama Island, the Museum opened in August 2022 in Freeport’s Port Lucaya Marketplace.

The location in the heart of Grand Bahama Island’s top hotel district makes the museum a natural stop for visitors, who can explore nearly 4,000 square feet of exhibits, highlighted by artifacts recovered from the wreck of the Spanish galleon Nuestra Señora de las Maravillas, sunk with its rich cargo of treasure in the Bahama Channel in 1656.

Allen led the high-tech Allen Exloraation expedition that recovered a treasure trove of artifacts from the Maravillas, after the remains of the wreck had been picked over repeatedly.

The galleon was carrying a double load of gold and silver — its own, plus that salvaged from another ship that sank — when it departed from Colombia. When it hit a treacherous reef, it sank like a stone. Of the 650 people onboard, only 45 survived . Between the Spanish government and treasure hunters, most of the precious metal was later recovered, including more than 3.5 million Spanish Pieces of Eight.

The museum is a portal into maritime life and practice: stone ballast, iron hull fasteners, rings and pins, food jars, plates and dishes, and pieces of a navigational astrolabe. Allen Expeditions also raised genuine sunken treasure, including silver and gold coins, emeralds and amethysts, a soldier’s silver sword hilt, a pearl ring, and pendants worn by knights of the Order of Santiago.

The Maravillas is just part of the story told at the museum.

Also on display at the Museum are exhibits detailing the explorations of the seagoing Lucayan people and the lives of captured Africans on the journey through the Middle Passage.

Apart from the exhibit hall, the museum includes classroom space, a library and a lab used for ongoing exploration of the Maravillas wreck. The museum is open Monday-Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

EVENT  Guyana Basins Summit (GBS 2022) First Speakers Announced   2nd edition of the Guyana Basins Summitt will take place on October 4-6, 2022, in Georgetown, Guyana. We look forward to welcoming you to this exciting and timely event. Under the theme of ‘Responsibly Developing the Region’s Resources for a Prosperous and Sustainable Future’ the 2nd edition of GBS provides the opportunity to hear from government, meet the major operators, licence holders, tier one contractors, service companies and the entire value chain in Guyana’s emerging hydrocarbons sector.

Early bird registration ends this Friday. Register now and save $300 USD