While rescuers keep searching for signs of life in Venezuela and the death toll climbs as hopes dash daily and while the world prays that the guns go silent sooner than later in war zones and millions continue being displaced by armed conflicts and worsening natural disasters, the Global South continues to forcibly adjust to the new times in new and old ways. by combining tradition with innovation.
For Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Leaders heading to Saint Lucia for Sunday’s opening of their 51st Heads of Government Conference to take place July 5-8 meeting, all the above will also matter.
But this will definitely be more than just another scheduled leadership parley, as the 15 leaders gather to review new regional problems – and especially since they last met in St. Kitts and Nevis (SKN) six months ago.
On their last day in Basseterre (February 28) and just days after being openly courted by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to back Washington’s newest round of blockades and embargos against Cuba, the US and Israel launched their attack on Iran that decapitated its Supreme Leader and the nation’s top political and religious leadership.
Since then, the four-month war has directly affected every Caribbean nation, government and citizen as a result of the resulting global energy crisis that’s spilled-over from the long closures and brief opening of the Strait of Hormuz.
Since then, too, while again making-up-to and with China in America’s best national interests and even while keeping the pressure on its NATO Allies in Europe to pay more for US protection, Washington has joined Brussels in a joint EU-US assault on the Caribbean, shifting immigration and visa access goalposts to restrict entry by Caribbean citizens and force their governments to dump their Citizenship by Investment Programs (CIPs).
Several CARICOM member-states have been pressured into adjusting or simply breaking-off their four-decades-old medical and health assistance ties with Havana and forced into discussions and signatures of Memoranda of Understanding to accept third-country nationals whose applications for asylum were rejected by the US.
But while home politics has seen different administrations take different approaches to the need for urgent and united responses to the increasing uncertainty that’s come with increased energy prices, CARICOM leaders have also had to spend the last 100 days pondering on how to ride the rougher waves brought by one who insists all the others were wrong on a matter appearing or being made to seem like only she seems to think she’s right.
It’s an unenviable situation where neither can do without each other, so none can throw the other out with its bathwater
As energy price-rises rose over the past three months, all other prices for everything and everyone everywhere, meteorologists and climate trackers have warned that while Caribbean citizens may be gasping from hotter heat at the same time as a predicted earlier hurricane season that’s already in place, this year’s El Nino weather disruptions will be worse in this part pf the world.
Climate Change is manifesting itself more frequently and in many different ways since the SKN summit and with Europe overheating, there are constant reports of the unthinkable, like: people drowning after seeking cool refuge in pools.
But the heat is also mounting on the leaders as rising prices start to bite and US immigration policies have basically seen the image of the USA as a Land of Immigrants frozen by ICE (immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents cleansing America of people who don’t look like Uncle Sam.
With new security alliances being established and the region’s energy landscape continuing to forcibly change as Big Oil increases penetration into Latin American and Caribbean oil and gas fields, there’s also evidence of increasing new realignments forced by changed and changing circumstances that have implications for united approaches to shared common problems.
As per usual, the kneejerk tendency of nations seeking and competing for bilateral arrangements continues, even as natural and man-made disasters — near and far — demand that leaders better show they understand Bob Marley’s warning that ‘When the rain falls, it doesn’t fall on one man’s house’.
They should also remember the predecessors who reminded the region in its earlier ages of independence, that ‘If we don’t swim together, we’ll sink together.’
The lessons from Venezuela will certainly see and hear the region’s leaders respond loudly by saying and doing things to reassure citizens scared into realizing that all islands and nations are just-as vulnerable – and none is ever prepared for natural or man-made disasters.
Their host Prime Minister Philip J. Pierre, however, can be expected to try to inject some measure of an appeal for them “to say and do more of the little things that matter, like vital things necessary at home and community levels to let people know they too can take precautions by doing simple things — like not dumping old beds in rivers and ‘harvesting water’ by collecting rain water from roofs for various uses, instead of pumping piped water into tanks or allowing it to be “swallowed by the ground.”
But while the leaders are expected to continue nursing migraine-sized headaches on some domestic issues at home and around the conference table in Saint Lucia, the world continues to turn with and around the Caribbean.
Yet, some things simply don’t change, including the attitude of the world’s richest nations and the international organizations they control towards the Global South as a bloc — and individual poor and developing nations — about who they care less about, than the fruitfulness and profitability of their investments in developing nations — as just shown by the World Bank’s sudden decision last Monday to backtrack on its earlier commitment to spend 45% of its lending resources on Climate Financing.
It’s against this background that they’ll meet on the appropriate conference theme ‘CARICOM: From Resilience to Renewal in a Changing World!’