Co-ordinated action needed, says PM Mottley

Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley is calling for co-ordinated action by the global community to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.

She was at the time addressing the World Health Organisation (WHO) virtual press conference in commemoration of World Health Day, yesterday.

“I pray that we will across the world summon the courage to be able to have co-ordinated action, not just acting together, but co-ordinated action such that we are in a position to be able to see the end of this pandemic because we are acting collectively with shutdowns; acting collectively with protocols; acting collectively with the kinds of policy responses that we now know after a year, are critical if we are to put this behind us.”

Ms. Mottley, who had only hours earlier accepted the country’s first tranche of COVID-19 vaccines from the COVAX Facility, thanked WHO’s Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus for his continuous intervention to ensure equitable vaccine distribution.

She however went on to point out that the Caribbean’s journey over the last year has been “torturous”.

“The reality is that our market size in many instances is simply too small to command the attention of global pharmaceutical companies, or indeed of other suppliers of goods in the normal supply chain that will lead to vaccine distribution. And the bottom line is that we have also, separately, been regarded by the global community as countries that have come out of the depths of poverty, and therefore are not deserving of assistance in the traditional ways normally reserved for the most vulnerable. This has made life difficult,” she declared.

“We have held on to the promise of COVAX and I come to you this morning having received the first tranche of Barbados’ vaccines. But, for many globally, this has been a difficult exercise because as we have seen the spikes literally grow, we have not had access even when we are prepared to pay.”

The post-COVID-19 recovery budget and plans to protect and prioritise health and social sectors, according to Prime Minister Mottley, “is truly being felt by the majority of us”. She noted that the World Bank estimates that global GDP would fall about four per cent this year with between 40-60 million people entering extreme poverty, “but our reality also is as a tourism and travel-dependent country, the fall in our GDP last year was not 4%, 8%, 12% or 16% – it was 18%, threatening to take our country back more than a decade as a result for the lost of production and productive capacity”.

“Regrettably, we continue to be treated globally as one of those countries that is not deserving to concessional capital, even as we face the most difficult crisis that we have faced in a century,” Mottley stressed, further expressing that these are issues which she hopes the Development Committee of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) can look into when they meet this week.

“We’ll begin to start to put our case for the need to use different criteria for determining how countries should access serious concessional capital, most needed now in order to stave off the worst aspects of this pandemic. But, more importantly, to deal with the long-lasting consequences of the pandemic, which is the social and economic losses that have sustained in the last decade.”