… And I.D.B.’s lending capacity will be increased by billons

While we wait to see the depth of the sympathy that the U.S. congressmen have for CARICOM’s offshore banking sector, there were very immediate and positive results coming from Canada and the United States regarding the boosting of international lending institutions such as the Inter-American Development Bank. Canada’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper has pledged five billion dollars for I.D.B. Barrow says that with that increase in lending ability, Belize should be able to access more concessionary financing for infrastructural as well as social development.

Prime Minister Dean Barrow
“I had a personal chat with the president Moreno of the I.D.B. and secured his promise that the fifteen million or so US dollars remaining on our social plea bill will in fact be disbursed this fiscal year, indeed over the next few months. We, for example, had loans approved of almost thirty million US from the IDB with respect to that tourism project and with respect to a solid based management project. That’s not enough. I would really love to see us do something that the Mexicans are doing. They have set up some state agencies to purchase and distribute food to the most marginalized groups at something like fifteen percent less than the market value. I am desperate to be able to do something like that here in Belize before the term ends. They tell you because of your debt profile, you don’t have the fiscal space to be able to borrow much more than they’re lending. Well, the position of CARICOM, the position developing countries, the position of the Latin American countries, especially the small ones, they don’t want to hear that we don’t have the capacity, the additional capacity or the capacity to service the additional debt. Keep the money coming because we need that money to invest in the kinds of programs—I just spoke about social intervention, infrastructure that will create jobs that will help to lift the economy and that will ensure that there is no question of any of the countries in this region, apart from Haiti, becoming a failed stated. And so that’s what this press to the developed world by CARICOM and others about the need to capitalize far more amply the I.F.I.s is about. Remember that included in that is as well our insistence that the I.M.F. should now be giving more money, which has happened. Two hundred and fifty billion, I think the G-twenty pledged in London to lend us without the kinds of conditionalities that’s made the I.M.F. a household bad word in developing countries. And that’s what’s been agreed in London, that’s what was reiterated to us by Prime Minister Harper of Canada. So all together, this increase capitalization of the traditional development lending institutions; I.D.B., World Bank, in our region CABEI, and C.D.B. as well as more ample capitalization from IMF even as a lender of last resort ought to have practical consequences, ought to pay practical dividends for a country such as Belize.”