SIDS Demand Global Attention Amid Ongoing Vulnerabilities

Mr. President, Your Excellencies,

Despite a quarter century of analysis, advocacy, and prescriptions set forth by the leaders of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) and international institutions charged with advancing the interest of SIDS, our travails are enduring in a global community largely disinterested in our well-being and that of small states generally. We in SIDS remain unequally yoked in a global community motivated by the baser instincts of the untrammeled power of money, ideology, guns, lethal weaponry, territorial and global dominance.

To be sure, the SIDS have made incremental advances in the global community and in the architecture of international relations; nevertheless, for us in SIDS it has been a situation akin to going up a down escalator in which the down escalator is moving at a faster pace than the upward baby steps. Frequently, it appears as though much of the powerful would wish that SIDS did not exist. But here we are stubborn as the heavens; we are not going anywhere despite our massive vulnerabilities. Our people have a permanence in this world even if some of our lands wash away; we have a voice, and we will continue to use it.

We demand as of right especial support from the international community to address efficaciously the unique social, economic, and environmental vulnerabilities of SIDS, in the interest of the nearly 70 million people who permanently occupy the seascape and landscape of SIDS, and in the interest, too, of all the other eight billion or so persons who inhabit Mother Earth. Small Island Exceptionalism ought to be a category embedded formally in international law and accorded most favorable treatment.

Rather than securing a most favourable treatment, the SIDS are required to fight to maintain even the special considerations which Providence or serendipity has bestowed upon them. A case in point is the attempt, currently, by the International Development Association (IDA) to pit the most vulnerable — the SIDS — against the poorest countries in its quest to tighten the terms under which qualifying SIDS, of a particular income level, such as St. Vincent and the Grenadines, obtain soft-loans through the World Bank—IDA nexus. [The answer is not to penalise further the most vulnerable, but for the richer countries globally to put more money to the cause of the poorest; and to broaden concessionary treatment to vulnerable middle-income SIDS.] In any event, why is the World Bank persisting with the single, anachronistic and ill-designed metric of average per capita income in respect of vulnerable SIDS, in the age of the Anthropocene, as against a more comprehensive and sensible measure of a Multi-dimensional Vulnerability Index?

Your Excellencies, the unvarnished truth is that the developed countries have not kept their promises to the SIDS, except the most marginal ones.

Importantly, the countries of the developed world, the major historic, and contemporary emitters of greenhouse gases, have failed and/or refused to keep their solemn commitments of restricting the global temperature at below 1.5 degrees Celsius, above pre-industrial levels. Unless there are drastic alterations in the patterns of consumption, production, life, and living in developed, and large emerging economies, our planet is inexorably on a path to a proverbial hell in a hand-basket. In the process, countries of an island or seaboard civilisation are likely to be inundated by raging seas and enveloped in searing heat.

On the matter of the financing of climate change, the developed countries, which have the means and the major historic responsibility to contain this existential threat, have been parsimonious and less than responsible, in practice.

Even today, the cynicism and double-speak of several major developed countries is breathtaking in response to the quest of most of the global community to transform the international financial institutions as fit-for-purpose in today’s world, and for responsible, reasonable alterations in the actual modalities of climate change financing. High representatives of most of these developed countries pay lip-service, in general, to the innovative Bridgetown III proposals, endorsed by the Caribbean Community, only to nit-pick and delay, in the particular, on the essentials. Brazenly, when these developed countries make a marginal concession, they trumpet it as a major advance so as to send the proverbial fool a little further.

The Antigua and Barbuda Agenda for SIDS (ABAS), adopted earlier this year, encompasses an action-oriented framework for the way forward. The recently adopted “Pact for the Future” by the UNGA provides a wider and promising buttress.

In our advocacy for the 39 SIDS, we embrace, too, the cause of the Least Developed Countries, and the Landlocked Developing Countries — all 92 vulnerable countries in the UN System.

Your Excellencies, growing material dissatisfaction grips increasingly large numbers of people in both the metropoles and the hinterlands in this highly inter-connected world.

Noticeably, the ceremony of innocence is drowned, things are falling apart, the centres cannot hold, and the cascading effects are ripping the world asunder; the best of all lack conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. Creative resistance and reconstruction are the banners under which ordinary men and women across the globe are draping themselves. Sadly, in the North Atlantic countries there is growing and dangerous constituency for an illiberal, even a neo-fascist, option of looking forward to an illusory past in search of making again their countries unalloyed, mythical paradises of unrivaled dominance; they are looking forward to a past that never was.

At the same time, even a modest, middling social democracy is on the retreat because this old political shell of the post-1945 global order can barely contain the erupting contradictions within, and outside, it. A search for new modalities is emerging but not yet fully formed, in part because the old order is unprepared to relinquish, cede, or share power, even as it realizes that it cannot continue to rule in the old way; but the new is yet to be born, and the forces of change lack a sufficiency of strength to deliver satisfactory alterations.