I would like, first of all,
to thank the outgoing President, Mr. John Ashe, for
his sterling efforts in presiding over the sixty-eighth
session of the General Assembly in a year that was
dedicated to island States around the world. Let me
also congratulate Mr. Sam Kutesa and welcome him
as the incoming President of the General Assembly
at its sixty-ninth session. He can count on Grenada’s
support to contribute to the deliberations in a positive
and meaningful way.
As we gather here in New York yet again, we can
celebrate the remarkable history of our institution in this
beautifully refurbished United Nations Headquarters.
I wish to put on record Grenada’s appreciation to the
donors who contributed and to the Secretary-General
for his leadership on this project. With its large open
spaces and glass façade, the building’s design speaks
to our ideals of transparency, openness and dialogue.
The building’s mid-twentieth-century features recall
the spirit of an age when space was the new frontier.
The space age has given way to a new and
exciting information age. Today, a young girl armed
with a smartphone in Gujarat, India, can Google the
same satellite images of our planet as a child in Great
Britain. Exposed to the right ideas on the Internet,
children — whether in Greensboro in the United
States, or Grenoble in France, or Grenada in the
Caribbean — can have the same seeds of hope, the
same aspirations for happiness and personal growth,
and the same sense of duty towards neighbourhood and
planet. For aspiring young people everywhere, coming
of age is symbolized by ownership, not of a car, but of
a mobile phone or a computer tablet. Those are today’s
vehicles on the information highway for the world’s
youth seeking ideas, identity and connectedness.
We come to the United Nations today to feel that
sense of connectedness amid the chaos of today’s
challenges. We come to these refurbished Headquarters
to renew our commitment to peace and security and
to revitalize our mission, not to the stars, but to work
for a safer planet with shared prosperity for all. Today,
in this iconic Hall, it is too soon to say “mission
accomplished”, but for the most part, our original
mission for dialogue and the rule of law among abiding
nations has been accomplished.
Sitting here among ourselves, we are, for the most
part, preaching to the converted. The long-standing
conflict between Israel and Palestine has given way to a
realization that the only viable solution is the two-State
solution. Moreover, sworn enemies in this Hall now
confer on how to tackle much more sinister enemies
of peace.
Those new enemies have no flags fluttering
proudly outside, nor electronic nameplates inside.
They are not here in our space-age Hall; they are out
there in cyberspace, a place where violence and hate
in isolated corners can spread like wildfire across the
globe. Captured on mobile phones and uploaded to the
Internet, gruesome images from a remote backstreet
can inflict fear in the hearts of ordinary citizens on
Main Street everywhere.
The shocking beheadings we see in the media are
the weeping ooze from the cancerous underbelly of our
world today. They are the symptoms of an insidious and
pervasive unease eating away at the very foundations
on which this great institution was built. And with each
new escalation of violence, we feel a sense of horror
not only at the acts themselves but perhaps more at our
inability to act.
War and insecurity in the information age have
mutated so much that neither our resolutions, our
agencies nor our armies are enough to break the fever
of this viral menace of transnational actors. And so,
looking beyond our Capital Master Plan that reimagines
our twentieth-century beginnings, let us build a new
Information Master Plan fit for the twenty-first century
with electronic highways that will one day connect this
Hall to every child in every village.
The information age is a new season in the arc of our
institution’s history — a new season in which everyone
has a voice, be they the youths of the Arab Spring or the
Occupiers of Wall Street’s winter of discontent. Today’s
information age brings a new transparency between
the haves and the have-nots — between the 1 per cent
and the 99 per cent. Whether segmented by class, race,
religion or political affiliation, inequality is the disease
of our times, contributing to the political eruptions all
over the world.
We now have — for the first time — documented
evidence of the root causes of the growing inequalities
in society. A new economic treatise, entitled Capital in
the Twenty-First Century, by Thomas Piketty, analyses
over a century of economic data and concludes that
the rich are getting richer, faster than everyone else.
But there are two things that reduce income inequality.
The first is the distribution of knowledge that promotes
growth. The second is war, which destroys capital. The
first option is a rising tide that lifts all ships; the second
is a sinking stone that drowns all hope — the very
antithesis of this Organization.
We must focus more of our global policy on proactive
interventions that promote sustainable growth. We must
encourage economic growth by distributing knowledge
through education, information and communication
technology, as well as through skills and technology
transfers. We do indeed need an Information Master
Plan if we are to proactively confront threats in the
twenty-first century.
The World Development Report 2011: Conflict,
Security and Development, published by the World Bank,
acknowledges that development agencies have not yet
fully adapted to the needs of the twenty-first century
and that they do not yet have the capacity to adequately
help fragile States. It finds that unemployment is the
number-one reason for youths to join criminal gangs
and contending armies. It reminds us that investing in
citizen security, justice and jobs is essential to reducing
violence. We know that once mass violence takes root
in a society, it can take a generation or more to recover.
As we look around at the violence in the world
today, I ask the question: can our twentieth-century
institutions cope with twenty-first-century shocks?
Do we have the courage to be proactive in fostering
jobs and growth, or will we wait until violence erupts?
This year’s World Development Report 2014 is all about
managing opportunity and managing risk, from the
level of the household to the level of the international
community. The essence of the report is that the
benefits of proactive preparation can outweigh the
costs of responding retroactively.
The risks from climate shocks are among the
most terrifying for Grenada and for islands around
the world. Grenada places on record its appreciation
for the Secretary-General’s leadership in calling for a
Climate Summit. In the last four years alone, we have
seen floods raging across the world. With the hottest
temperatures on record in recent years, forest fires have
raged across almost all continents, devouring millions
of acres of forest land, causing damages in the tens of
billions of dollars. Glacial retreats from the Andes to
the Himalayas and from Greenland to Antarctica are
moving at record speeds. We are seeing hurricanes and
cyclones as never before.
Two years ago, right here in New York, Hurricane
Sandy struck and disabled the economic engine of the
United States. It caused $68 billion worth of damage.
But this represents less than 1 per cent of the gross
domestic product (GDP) of the United States in contrast
with the island States, where damages of between
10 per cent and 50 per cent of GDP are common, and, in
the case of Grenada, where damages occurred totalling
200 per cent of GDP from Hurricane Ivan alone. Even
as we speak, this week Grenada was plagued with
unseasonably high rains that have caused numerous
landslides. The value of the damage is yet to be
determined. Like our neighbours Saint Lucia and Saint
Vincent and the Grenadines in 2013, we are forced to
dedicate already scarce financial resources to repair
and mitigate this.
There is a link between these events and the high
indebtedness of small Caribbean islands. To paraphrase
the World Bank’s country assistance strategy for the
Eastern Caribbean, the years when fiscal policy failed
to explain increases in debt-to-GDP ratios were the
same years when natural disasters occurred. Given
these risks, island States need concessionary financing.
This is critical to ensuring growth, jobs and economic
development. For small island developing States (SIDS),
a robust economy, combined with risk-management
policies and instruments, is the best combination for
resilience.
When our current Administration was elected
16 months ago, the indebtedness of our country was
unsustainable. But the Grenadian people came together
under the leadership of Prime Minister Mitchell.
Unions, churches, non-governmental organizations,
political parties and businesses all rallied to form a
social compact to put Grenada on a firm fiscal footing.
We tightened our belts and asked the Grenadian people
to contribute more as we undertook our home-grown
fiscal reform. The indebtedness of the SIDS must
be counted among the many challenges of our time.
The annual cry of the small island States to make
concessionary funding available is the early-warning
system for the international community. Let us settle
the least developed countries graduation issue in
favour of the SIDS, rather than use it as a parallel
climate-negotiation tool against the SIDS.
One country that is singled out for its stellar
management of disasters is Cuba. We all have much
to learn from Cuba on areas as diverse as disaster risk
management and public-health management. Cuba
sends its engineers, teachers and doctors around the
world to improve the lives of others. Is it not time to fully
recognize the contributions of Cuba to the international
community — and if not now, then when? Is it not time
to end the Cold War attitudes to Cuba — and if not now,
then when? Is it not time to end the embargo against
Cuba — and if not now, then when?
The explosion of violence that we see in today’s
trouble spots is driven by the flawed principle of
disrespect for international law and the territorial
integrity of Member States. There comes a time when
old enemies must turn swords into ploughshares and
look to a future with dignity and with hope.
Just as climate change is the challenge of our time,
it can also be said that climate change is possibly one
of the greatest opportunities for wealth creation and
shared prosperity that this generation has seen. Today,
the renewable energy market is estimated to be in
the order of $16 trillion, including $12 billion in the
Caribbean alone. In 2012, there were some 6 million jobs
in renewable energy and the International Renewable
Energy Agency (IRENA) expects 17 million jobs
by 2030. Today, pension funds with collective assets
exceeding $12 trillion are focusing on climate risk,
renewable energy and energy efficiency.
Island States like Grenada are seized not only of
climate challenge, but also with climate solutions. For
us, a robust economy, combined with sound disaster
risk-management policies and instruments, is the most
sustainable form of adaptation to climate change.
But in Grenada, we cannot educate our people if our
schoolchildren have no access to electricity. Due
to the high import costs of fossil fuels, electricity in
Grenada costs four to five times higher than it does in
developed countries. But countries with low electricity
prices have to subsidize renewables; not so in the
islands. Islands like Grenada come to the climate table,
not like hapless victims cap-in-hand, but offering the
international community 100 per cent renewables that
can be introduced with zero subsidies.
If we are to limit global carbon dioxide concentrations
to 450 parts per million, then, according to the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fifth
assessment report, our electricity sector needs a total
transformation. While island States are the least of the
emitters, they are the most cost-effective places for
renewables. I congratulate the Small Island Developing
States Sustainable Energy Initiative (SIDS DOCK),
IRENA and Sustainable Energy For All for acting on
this.
Grenada is working to transform its electricity
sector. Solving the energy challenge for islands like
Grenada will remove a drag on our economies and
better position us to withstand environmental shocks.
This is adaptation with prospects for jobs, growth and
shared prosperity for all. I am delighted to announce
that, in addition to working with Germany, the World
Bank, SIDS DOCK and IRENA, Grenada has signed
a groundbreaking memorandum of understanding
with the United States to assist us in transforming our
energy mix, as we announced in Samoa. We have also
signed an memorandum of understanding with New
Zealand to help us better understand our geothermal
resources. Grenada will serve as the pilot country for
the regional energy initiative of the United States and
will work with New Zealand on geothermal energy.
We welcome others to join this partnership and this
unfolding success story that is Green Grenada.
As we have said before, we wish to recommend
the following actions. Let us operationalize the
Green Climate Fund with a window for islands.
Let us implement 100 per cent renewable energy in
island States. Let us put a price on carbon and stop
subsidizing fossil fuels. Let us decarbonize food
security. Agriculture, forestry and other land use
contribute 25 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions. Let
us have greater support for climate-smart agriculture
that can deliver a triple win of increasing productivity
and incomes, increasing resilience to climate change,
and reducing or removing carbon emissions. Grenada
is pleased to be working with the Government of the
Netherlands on a climate-smart agricultural alliance
and on Global Blue Growth and Food Security Initiative.
Blue growth is vital for the economies of island
States around the world, and our tri-island State
of Grenada, Carriacou and Petite Martinique sees
itself as an Ocean State, given that our exclusive
economic zone in the sea is over 70 times larger than
our land mass. Our tri-island State is pleased to host
the secretariat of the Caribbean Challenge Initiative
(CCI), which is supported by Germany and others.
The CCI promotes an enhanced marine environment,
and Grenada is committed to conserving its near-shore
marine environment. Through reports like the Sunken
Billions, the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture
Organization have shown that conservation efforts
are critical to ensuring maximum economic yield in
fisheries.
In the past 30 years, we have lost 30 per cent of our
corals and mangroves. This is why Grenada welcomes
efforts such as the Global Blue Growth Initiative and
the Global Partnership for Oceans, and the efforts of
The Economist and United States Secretary of State
John Kerry to bring renewed attention to the oceans. We
look forward to welcoming our partners to Grenada in
January 2015 for the launch of the Global Blue Growth
and Food Security initiatives.
In closing, Grenada acknowledges the successes
of the 2014 Third International Conference on Small
Island Development States, held in Samoa, and, building
on the momentum of Samoa, we look forward to the
successful conclusion to the sustainable development
goals process leading into the twenty-first session of
the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change in Paris
next year.
As we move forward, let us remember that a number
of the Millennium Development Goals have not been
achieved. We have a duty, therefore, to re-examine our
approach to peace, security and shared prosperity. We
need collective action on a global consensus. We need
to act now before it is too late. We must shed the old
ways and adopt twenty-first-century approaches for
this millennium generation if we are to bequeath to
them and future generations the bounty we inherited
and the bounty that they deserve.