Mixed reviews on development goals

 UNITED NATIONS (CMC):

Caribbean countries have given mixed reviews of the efforts being made to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - eight international development goals that all 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organisations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015.

Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar was among Caribbean leaders providing reports to the 65th Session of the UN General Assembly. She said her country had made significant progress towards achieving the MGDs.

"My Government recognises that the space Trinidad and Tobago will occupy as a member of the international community in the future will depend heavily on the extent to which our people will be empowered to be technologically proficient, innovative and knowledge driven," she said in her maiden address to the UN.

Remains vulnerable

"As a small island developing state that has attained middle-income country status, we are fully cognisant of the fact that we remain vulnerable to international financial, food and energy crises as well as natural disasters," she added.

"These vulnerabilities are not unique to Trinidad and Tobago, but affect the Caribbean and a large percentage of Commonwealth states, of which I have the honour to be the present chair-in-office," she continued.

In recognising that the way out of poverty is through education, community empowerment and social entrepreneurship, Persad-Bissessar said her administration is "re-engineering" its strategies to achieve those MDGs which require greater efforts.

Her Antiguan counterpart, Baldwin Spencer, said there was "overwhelming" evidence that progress in achieving the MDGs was "fragmented", and he called for "dramatic" action in meeting the targets.

"I am not here to pronounce the MDGs dead or to bury them," Spencer told the 65th Session of the UN General Assembly on Wednesday.

"Rather, I remain convinced that they can still be revived and achieved with a massive infusion of focused efforts and resources," he added.

"If there is one fact that we can all agree on, it is that something dramatic needs to be done, and done urgently, if the globally agreed MDGs are to be met," Spencer continued.

He said 10 years after the MDGs were adopted, they are "on critical life support," urging the international community to "collectively step up the pace of their implementation."

"If we do not do that, the MDGs could remain forever abandoned and lost in that graveyard of lost and failed commitments," the Antiguan leader said.

For its part, Guyana says it has adopted a "progressive and integrated" approach in addressing the MDGs.

Foreign Minister Carolyn Rodrigues-Birkett said that "prudent management of macroeconomic and fiscal policy, and priority to social and infrastructural development," has allowed the country to make significant progress on several of the MDGs and to "weather the worst impacts of the financial and food crises.

"We have witnessed achievements in education, the environment, gender equality, poverty eradication, and health, in particular, in reversing the trend in mother-to-child transmission of HIV," she said.