Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley has restated her call for a more level playing field when it comes to loan access and debt financing from the international financial system.
Speaking during the University of the West Indies’ Vice Chancellor’s Forum which examined Sustainable Island Futures yesterday, she restated her concerns about the inequitable treatment meted out to small island states by the larger countries which controlled international financial institutions.
In the “conversation” which also featured renowned American economist Jeffrey Sachs, witnessed by a live audience and also followed virtually, the Prime Minister pointed to the harsh conditions imposed on Small Island Developing States as compared with those imposed on richer countries in their borrowing.
“International organisations like the WTO [World Trade Organisation] that refuse to accept that a one-size-fits-all prescription does not work and that countries such as ours that have a contribution to global trade in goods of 0.0000 per cent and global trade in services of 0.0001 per cent, can do little to distort the global market and hence impose on us rules that have led to the destruction of our indigenous manufacturing sector and capacity to have any form of industrialisation, have been a cruel and unusual cut by a world that simply does not see small island states, does not hear small island states and is not prepared to treat to us until we become a crisis.”
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