Presentation of Saint Lucia’s 2026-27 budget estimates by Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre, in the context of today’s global geopolitical, was, in many respects, both interesting and insightful.
Prepared before the US and Israel attacked Iran on February 28, the estimates nonetheless reflect what was presented as “showing the economic metrics are working.”
The stable economic period during the four years of his first term resulted in the maze of accumulated annual matrices that led to the 2025 Report Card, also to be noted for more than just its numerical accuracy.
The parliament approved the preliminary estimates on Thursday, leaving MPs and the Government – and Opposition – to prepare for the presentation of the Prime Minister’s Policy Statement, which will actually outline what the government plans to do over the next year, with the provisional $2.18 Billion budget.
With 25 days until that statement is delivered on April 21, it’ll now be for the Minister for Finance, in particular, to focus attention on how the ripples and waves from the conflict in the Persian Gulf affects the world and the nation when that day comes.
The Prime Minister earlier indicated that his first administration’s prudent policies had ensured it saved enough during the four years of COVID-19 and post-Ukraine War to allow for it to “buffer” increasing energy costs for consumers in the coming period when petrol prices, in particular, will hit home hard.
The local impacts of increased energy prices beyond the petrol pump through increased prices for virtually every other product, from food and medicine to everything else imported, haven’t really started being felt.
But the ‘imported inflation’ PM Pierre has kept referring to before and since President Donald Trump imposed US tariffs on the rest of the world has been reflected worldwide, with oil costs per barrel having risen 35% in one day to as-much-as US $110.
Should the Strait of Hormuz remain shut unless and until Iran’s terms and conditions to end the war are met and if oil facilities continue to be attacked, the effects on world energy prices can escalate faster.
Caribbean citizens will certainly get hit where it hurts most – in their pockets and stomachs – and that’ll start as soon as this coming Tuesday (March 31).
Before presenting the interim estimates, the PM had assured Saint Lucians petrol prices will remain the same “for the next three weeks.”
However, three weeks is a very long time and highly-costly in a war on which US $28 Billion has been spent in the past month only, at a rate of $US 1Billion daily.
And Washington is seeking an extra $200 Billion to maintain America’s military presence in the affected region – plus almost just-as-much to arm Gulf States hosting the US military bases being used to attack Iran.
Caribbean people can only try to guess what a difference it would make for the Caribbean and the rest of the world’s Small Island Developing States (SIDS), if they were to have been afforded access to any proportionate share of those colossal sums for development purposes.
For the Caribbean, this total waste in the face of global distress facing countries of the Global South is also happening when the world’s richest nations continue to push back against CARICOM and Africa’s calls for Reparations from Europe for Slavery and Native Genocide.
The US, Israel and Argentina were the only three countries voting against a United Nations (UN) resolution earlier this week calling for reaffirmation of the UN’s earlier declaration of the same two decades ago.
In 2006, the General Assembly, through resolution 61/19, recognized that “the slave trade and slavery are among the worst violations of human rights in the history of humanity, bearing in mind particularly their scale and duration” — and designated 25 March 2007 as the International Day for the Commemoration of the 200th Anniversary of the Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Ghana moved the resolution to qualify what was generally quantified back in 2006 and the nations that built empires on slavery invented every reason to try to prevent its passing, but it prevailed with 123 votes in favour, even though with 52 abstentions.
The Brattle Group has determined that rich nations on both sides of the Atlantic that bred, fed and benefitted from slavery in the Caribbean and the Americas now owe calculable sums.
In a 2023 report, it found that between US $100 trillion and US $131 trillion is owed in reparations for Transatlantic Chattel Slavery — a figure calculated for 31 nations, covering damages for enslaved individuals and lost economic wealth across the Caribbean and the Americas
Add overdue reparations and the costs of imported inflation in the Caribbean to the problems and challenges already facing a region under attack from traditional aid donors now competing for everything from sale of citizenship to how best to stem migration by the millions they earlier invited to escape to from supposed so-called ‘failed states’.
This is precisely the cobwebbed matrix confronting Prime Minister Pierre and his colleagues across the world’s poor and developing states who have to keep both eyes on the Persian Gulf and the worsening global energy crisis, while still having to attend to worsening problems from both climate change and regime change.
Yet, the complexities of ensuring the economic metrics work well-enough in these new times aren’t taught in classrooms as much as in boardrooms and on the real economic battlefields.
This situation therefore requires, among other things, that affected nations worldwide increase their advocacy and action for Reparatory Justice, from those responsible for imposing The World’s Worst Crime Against Humanity on 12 million Africans shipped into slavery and the three million cast overboard as spoilt cargo.
And in the case of CARICOM, it starts with continued pursuit of its’s now-revised 10-Point Plan for Reparatory Justice, earlier embraced in the USA and by India — and now endorsed by the African Union (AU).