CELAC | Mottley again calls for long term financing for middle income countries

KINGSTON, Jamaica, March 14, 2024 - Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley has again called on the world community to ensure that middle income countries have access to low cost, long term debt as well as climate finance, the capitalization of the funds and the budgets to do adaptation.

Addressing the recent  Summit of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC)  Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, she said that middle income countries cannot survive unless they have access to long term, low cost debt.  “We need 30–40-year debt at the very minimum.

‘Europe found a way to accommodate both the United Kingdom as well as Germany in the last century, to recognize that they both need both long term debt and to cap the costs of debt service to a percentage of exports in order to be able to allow Germany to recover after World War II,” Mottley declared.

The real issue of insurance and the lack of insurance is becoming the cause of the implosion of the financial system, that we have to support mortgages and to support expansion of businesses through access to finance.

If people cannot get access to insurance, the whole financial system as we know it will start to implode because that is the basis upon which most borrowing and lending takes place in our world.

We also, therefore, must address very quickly the fact that the world needs an institution to secure the funding of global public goods.

Whatever else we say, there are five things that will put us on the back foot: the climate crisis with its loss of biodiversity;

The issue of pandemics and health care and basic access - how do we avoid and protect ourselves from the next pandemic;  The question of basic access to food and water because even though we talk about climate, if people don't have water and food within a week or two, there is no life;

The question of access to fairness within the digital framework - you cannot have tech companies with market capitalization in the billions of dollars and people without access to digital, but at the same time, we need a united platform to ensure that artificial intelligence does not become the equivalent of the climate crisis for us as a people.

And fifthly: we need to make sure that we deal with the consequences of war and fragility.