Regional leaders to meet with US delegation in Barbados

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, CMC – Prime Minister Dr Keith Rowley Thursday said he will be travelling to Barbados joining “certain” regional leaders for a weekend meeting with a high level United States delegation.

Speaking at a news conference, Rowley told reporters that the meeting will be with “some decision makers, high ranking members of the United States government, which is currently in transition.

'We have a number of issues on the table, not the least in which is something called the Bridgetown Initiative. We have been fighting with the Bretton institutions to treat us more fairly in these difficult times and also to get terms and conditions…for our countries,”  he said.

The Bridgetown Initiative is a call for urgent and decisive action to reform the international financial architecture (IFA) that was designed at a time when most of the current member states were not independent and when climate risks or social inequalities, including gender equality, were not considered pre-eminent development challenges.

The small island developing states (SIDS), including those in the Caribbean have become increasingly at odds with the reality and needs of the world today, making the IFA entirely unfit for purpose in a world characterised by unrelenting climate change, increasing systemic risks, extreme inequality, highly integrated financial markets vulnerable to cross-border contagion, and dramatic demographics, technological, economic, and geopolitical changes.

The Bridgetown Initiative is named for the capital city of Barbados, where the initiative originates. While Barbados continues to play a leading role, it is not an initiative of Barbados alone, but rather a coalition of partners in a movement for global change.

Rowley told reporters that this approach is being led by the Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

"I have been involved with it, been to Washington on more than one occasion. The US delegation has been to the Caribbean. We thought we had made some progress, but it has been crystalising on something called the Bridgetown Initiative which we need to defend and grow and advance to the US authorities and the international financial bodies,” Rowley said.

“Therefore we will meet in Barbados from Friday afternoon,” he said adding “we cannot but be engaged in these issues. They have far reaching consequences,” he added.

Rowley did not name the other regional leaders expected at the meeting with the US officials or whether these officials are from the outgoing Biden administration or the incoming team from the President-elect Donald Trump.

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