Barbados is in a severe economic and social crisis. Our hard fought prosperity is under serious threat.
Recent and current global developments suggest a severe slowdown in economic growth and a possible double-dip recession in the United States and Europe.
Informed international commentators see many risks in Europe and the US for a prolonged period of economic stagnation and high unemployment and even the potential for social dislocations.
The world is in an economic, social and ideological revolution every bit as disruptive as the industrial revolution.
This new environment, call it The Globotech Era, has many risks but for the wise and the bold there are great opportunities.
Because of the reach that is enabled by digital technologies, island nations are not at any disadvantage, as shown by Singapore, Cyprus and others, and it would be some irony if, presented with all the opportunities available to Barbados in this new era, that we should fail – when in the past we succeeded as a nation when we had to overcome the disadvantages of being a remote island nation.
Our current approach to problem-solving and grasping opportunities is flawed: much too slow and adversarial for our own good.
Our failure to recognise this new environment and even worse, to delay fast responses, threatens our very survival as an independent nation.
In Barbados, we have two main sets of challenges:
1. The rescue challenges – immediately getting our national balance sheet (unsustainably high debt and deficits) in better shape to satisfy the global credit rating agencies and other multilateral agencies such as the International Monetary Fund and the Inter-American Development Bank from which we seek support.
2. The development challenges – dealing now and aggressively with creating an enabling environment for economic diversification and growth: the strategic agenda for growth in a new global technological age.
An analogy would be a ship at sea in very stormy waters and in danger of sinking. The first task is to get it safely into port (rescue), before setting out to sail the seven seas (development).
Minister of Finance Chris Sinckler’s Budget presentation mostly tried to address the first challenge, that is, stop the boat from sinking. But he has not gone far enough in terms of expenditure cuts and public sector reforms.
Leader of the Opposition Owen Arthur’s presentation dealt more with the strategic agenda for the essential longer term developmental changes needed.
Both are just as important and closely linked and must be tackled simultaneously.
In such a violent storm, we need all hands on deck – Team Barbados.
We just cannot afford the luxury of half the crew being disengaged as the ship flounders in a storm whose duration and intensity will be long and turbulent. Or worse perhaps, some of the crew denying the ship is in a storm that threatens to sink us.
This crisis affords Barbados the opportunity to show real leadership and to be bold and innovative, as it has demonstrated it can be in its history. We need to immediately accelerate our evolution to the next level of our potential.
I am suggesting therefore that we consider creating immediately a National Economic Transformation Team (NETT), selected from all stakeholders in the Social Partnership (and to include the prime minister and minister of finance, and Owen Arthur and Mia Mottley), to immediately put our collective heads together to agree as a nation how to proceed over the next 18 months.
[It should] also immediately develop a 100 Days Action Plan and a longer term vision (say, to 2025) of where Barbados wants to be in a world that is in a technological and ideological revolution.
Whilst this NETT would have an initial life of 18 months (extended if needs be), it should also be tasked with developing a new governance model to unleash the talented resources in Barbados.
Barbados can either move forward as a nation united (Team Barbados) or delay taking imperative actions now because of our adversarial political system, which is an obstacle in the current protracted economic downturn.
Speed of response is critical or else we will become the country that promised the most but lost its way, and we will be left behind and see our standard of living drop dramatically.
• Peter Boos is chairman of the Barbados Entrepreneurship Foundation.
