Robert BuddanSmall states must revive the agenda for sustainable development and new opportunities are emerging for this. The global agenda has been captured by the U.S. and its war on terrorism over the past four years. Our terror is of a different sort. The Caribbean is an area of high
vulnerability to many forces commodity prices for sugar and bananas; health crises, particularly HIV/AIDS; energy and runaway oil prices; drug trafficking and security exposure; climate change, especially rising sea levels and dangerous weather systems. The years 2004 and 2005 have dramatised this vulnerability more than any others.
Words like 'vulnerability' might sound like the theme for academic conferences, and an organisation like Small Island Developing States (SIDS) might be seen as just another organisation of governments and high-flying diplomats. Terms like 'sustainable development' might sound like a grand United Nations ideal. If all of these have seemed distant from the daily humdrum of crime, unemployment, and the struggle to make ends meet, they really address these very problems.
a safe place
They have to do with making the place where people live safe from floods; keeping them connected to each other by making roads passable and telephone lines open; making sure they have food to eat by keeping imports coming in and preserving the land for future farming; developing cheaper energy to keep factories and jobs going and car gas and taxi fare affordable; making agriculture and tourism viable for life-long security;
keeping the roofs on people's houses through good building methods and better building
materials, and so on.
The world was well on the way towards doing these things before George Bush came along and all
of a sudden international terrorism took the spotlight. Without
belittling terrorism the real terror we in the Caribbean face comes with names like Gilbert, Ivan, Dennis and so on, not bin Laden.
FIGHTING FOR THE RIGHT AGENDA
The Earth Summit of 1992 launched a programme of sustainable development among 172 governments. By 1994, the Caribbean became leaders among Small Island Developing States organised to protect against their own eco-
logical vulnerability. More countries began to establish ministries of the environment. Environmental movements mushroomed in global civil society. Green parties began to win more votes in Europe.
Regulations developed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and motor vehicle operators switched to unleaded gas. Explorations and experiments into alternative and clean energy sources increased and some companies began to improve diesel engines and build electric cars. Academics published
volumes on sustainable development and began to teach new courses on ecological economics. The big polluters, the Americans and the Europeans, signed the Kyoto Agreement on Climate Change. Things were happening.
attention change
Then George Bush came along and decided that the world should give its full attention to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden because climate change was not the real issue, terrorism, as defined by Americans for America, was. Unfortunately, we gave him that attention. We failed to keep the Earth Summit's agenda alive. Bush defeated 'Mr. Environmentalist', Al Gore, withdrew the U.S. from the Kyoto Agreement, and when American scientists reported to him earlier this year that global warming was actually increasing faster than had been thought, he said he didn't believe them and went back to his war on terror.
However, the world has not stood still for President Bush. Since 2004, the agenda has started to shift back to concerns with vulnerability. A very active and costly hurricane season revived interest in weather modification and disaster mitigation. The Asian Tsunami
crisis mobilised humanitarian
conscience and pulled attention back to the cataclysm of natural disasters. Now the G8 developed countries have decided to make
climate change one of their
priorities ahead of terrorism.
THE COMMONWEALTH AND A
SUSTAINABLE WORLD ORDER
This is an opening for small
state diplomacy to explore. Those who study vulnerability, from CARICOM and the Common-
wealth Secretariat to the United Nations, agree that small states are more vulnerable than large states. They face special handicaps.
Britain, as head of the G8 and
of the Commonwealth, says that climate change must be an international priority. Here is the oppor-
tunity for small states of the Commonwealth and of SIDS to make a sustainable world order the renewed emphasis. They will get support from within the Commonwealth organisation itself. Dr. Mark Collins, the new director of the Commonwealth Foundation, and widely experienced in ecology, says that big issues like debt forgiveness and increased aid will not lead to sustainable development if climate change is not addressed. He believes that countries must do vulnerability studies to identify the precise sectors to which aid should be directed. As new director, Dr. Collins appears willing to take the Commonwealth in the direction
of promoting sustainable
development.
Richard Bourne of the Commonwealth Policy Studies Institute says that climate change is one of the issues that Common-
wealth countries should focus on in the coming decades.
Susceptibility to natural disasters, limited institutional capacity, and insufficient economic diversification were areas of concern expressed by the joint Commonwealth and World Bank Task Force Report of 2000.
An important opportunity will soon present itself for the Caribbean to hammer home this renewed agenda. The Commonwealth Finance Ministers Meeting and the Annual Forum of Small States will be held in Barbados in September this year. Jamaica is Chairman of the G77 (which includes many small states) and China, and is in a special position to push vulnerability as a case for special and differential treatment in international trade.
Vulnerability is the best case for the argument in favour of special and differential treatment in trade. The Caribbean will be able to advise the Commonwealth about how best to build economic, social and ecological resilience in the face of natural disasters. We will be able to count up the social and economic costs of our recent
natural disasters and put the issues of budgets, agriculture, tourism, and other vulnerable sectors in the context of the need for special and differential treatment and increased international support.
MAKING THE CASE
Thirty-six of the 53 Commonwealth countries are small states with most having populations of 1.5 million or less. Most of these are African, Caribbean and Pacific states (ACP) states. Then there is the group of Small Island Developing States, an outcrop of the Association of Small Island States (AOSIS). As chairman of the G77 and China, Jamaica must establish a new diplomacy of small island states that places vulnerability as the main theme. As insular islands, we are dependent on international transport, air and seaports, which might be cut off or undermined by rising sea levels because of natural disasters. Small islands are susceptible to severe environmental and ecological threats, especially because they depend so much more on their ecology.
They have relatively weak
public and private institutional capacity to respond to domestic disasters and to affect interna-
tional financial and trade negotiations. They have relatively undiversified domestic markets and are vulnerable to changes in external markets. They are open and exposed to environmental and economic shocks. They are dependent on external finance but private investors regard small islands as greater risks because of their vulnerability. They have higher income vulnerability than large states by as much as 25 per cent. They consequently have higher levels of income inequality.
The opportunity to revive the agenda for sustainable development has only appeared in the past few weeks. We must respond quickly.
Robert Buddan lectures in the Department of Government, UWI. You can send your
comments to robert.buddan
@uwimona.edu.jm or infocus@gleanerjm.com.
