…And addresses UN on the World Financial Crisis

But today, the Prime Minister Dean Barrow was wearing the CARICOM hat as he addressed a United Nations Conference on the World Financial Crisis and its impact on development. Western leaders were absent from the UN Summit, but a few prime ministers and presidents from Latin America and the Caribbean were in New York. Notably absent so far has been Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez. Here is an excerpt from Barrow’s speech.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“We don’t have the surpluses and we don’t have the foreign exchange reserves that fiscal expansion, in our import dependent economies, would require. Our only option then, is to seek to utilize borrowed external resources from multilateral and bilateral sources. But it is a vicious circle because there are clear limitations on our ability to borrow. This is both for reason of the high debt levels accumulated as a result of past development efforts and the contraction in lending now caused by the very financial crisis we need to borrow ourselves out of. In a few days I will return home and I will face economic and social conditions that will have further deteriorated since I left to come here. Measurable advances must begin to happen after this meeting so that we can dislodge a growing conviction in our suffering nations.”