Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Senator Anthony Hylton (left), meeting with United Nations (UN) Secretary General, Kofi Annan at the U.N. headquarters in New York yesterday. - UN Photo/NYC

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Anthony Hylton will make his debut address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York today after meetings yesterday with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan together with other CARICOM foreign ministers and United States Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice.

Policy stance

In his address, Mr. Hylton will outline the foreign policy stance of Jamaica (independent of the country's portfolio responsibility for CARICOM external relations).

He will focus on development issues including trade, international debt, migration, illicit trade in guns, the situation in Western Darfur in Sudan and the Middle East.

He will also emphasise Jamaica's support for U.N. reform to give greater priority to development and transparency of the system.

Discussions between CARICOM and Ms. Rice were set to include CARICOM's consideration of a new bi-lateral free trade agreement with the U.S. and drug trafficking.

Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti and the non-CARICOM Dominican Republic were last week again included on the U.S. annual blacklist of major drug trafficking and transhipment countries.

War of words

The vote in October to select non-permanent members to the U.N. Security Council (UNSC) may have been a bone of contention between Ms. Rice and CARICOM, given that the region is backing Venezuela, a candidacy that the U.S. strongly opposes given the increasingly personalised war of words between Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and U.S. President George Bush. Mr. Chavez used his speech to the U.N. General Assembly last week to brand Mr. Bush as "the devil".

- R. S.