Belmopan 6 July 2009.
Prime Minister of Belize Hon. Dean Barrow’s chairmanship of the CARICOM Conference Heads of Government has come to an end. Prime Minister Barrow handed over chairmanship to Guyana’s President, H.E. Bharrat Jagdeo at the 30th Regular Meeting of the Conference of CARICOM Heads of Government held in Georgetown Guyana starting last Thursday July 2, 2009 and ending on Sunday July 5, 2009.
In his address at the opening ceremony on Thursday, Prime Minister Barrow recounted some of the accomplishments of the CARICOM family in the past six months under his chairmanship. Those accomplishments include the hosting in Trinidad and Tobago of the Summit of the Americas. In that regard
Prime Minister Barrow remarked, “We did so to deserved acclaim. Our diplomatic skills, particularly those of Prime Minister Manning, were much in evidence. And it pleases me to think that it was our principled, but carefully deployed position on Cuba that was the platform for the later rescission of our sister country’s OAS suspension.”
Prime Minister Barrow also recalled the Inter-Sessional Meeting in Belize which he said produced a recommitment to CARICOM’s Single Market and Economy. “There was a frank assessment of the continuing challenges, and a candid concession that the way ahead will throw up obstacles that will be almost Bunyanesque,” he commented. “But there was unanimity in the determination to stay the course.”
Among other accomplishments, Prime Minister Barrow cited the bail out of an international bank by the cash-strapped OECS governments, coordinated regional action to ameliorate the worst effects of the failure of CLICO, the diversification and reshaping of our tourism product and the restructuring of our economies to exploit the comparative advantage our language, literacy and trainability give us with respect to Information Communication Technology.
With respect to the coordinated efforts by CARICOM nations to overcome the global financial crisis, Prime Minister Barrow noted one serious obstacle which he defined as “the failure of the developed world, as progenitor of the crisis, to discharge their responsibility to us.” He said, “The developed world seems to have great difficulty in even agreeing the necessary adaptation and mitigation measures, much less in funding them.”
Prime Minster Barrow ended, nevertheless, on a positive and upbeat note, remarking, “Despite the hammer blows of this unprecedented crisis, bright prospects and sunlit vistas continue to be part of both our topography and our psychology.”
Prime Minister Barrow’s chairmanship of the CARICOM Conference Heads of Government began on January 1, 2009 and ended June 30, 2009. Prime Minister Barrow returned home on Monday, July 6, 2009.
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