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ECLAC Executive Secretary opens High Level Meeting in Trinidad and Tobago

26 June 2015|News

Ministers and high-level Government representatives from the Caribbean gathered in Trinidad and Tobago to consider progress made in implementation of development strategies for the region on occasion of the 17th meeting of the Monitoring Committee of the Caribbean Development and Cooperation Committee (CDCC).

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Attendees of the 17th Meeting of the Monitoring Committee of the CDCC
Attendees of the 17th Meeting of the Monitoring Committee of the CDCC
ECLAC Caribbean

“There is no question that the Caribbean is shouldering an unsustainable debt burden which compromises the capacity of the economies for sustained growth and restricts the options available to governments to introduce important social and welfare programmes” the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), Alicia Bárcena, said via video conference in opening the 17th meeting of the Monitoring Committee of the Caribbean Development and Cooperation Committee (CDCC) on 26 June, during which Ministers and high-level Government representatives from the Caribbean gathered in Trinidad and Tobago to consider progress made in implementation of development strategies for the region.

Also participating in the opening ceremony of the Monitoring Committee on the 40th year of the CDCC was the current Chair of the CDCC, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade of Jamaica, Arnaldo Brown; Trinidad and Tobago Foreign Affairs Minister, Winston Dookeran; Grenada Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Business, Clarice Modeste-Curwen; as well as senior officials of government and representatives of regional and international organizations.

The Monitoring Committee endorsed the key outcomes of the preceding two-day symposium that offered Caribbean policy makers and experts a forum to deliberate the region’s development priorities as the international community prepares to adopt a new set of global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Referring to the discussions of the symposium, Ms. Bárcena underscored that these represent “an important first step towards ensuring that the Post 2015 development agenda will work for the Caribbean; by identifying from among the 17 goals the ones that will best address the priority development needs of the region.”

The Monitoring Committee also focussed attention on strategies to address debt relief and to promote innovative financing in the Caribbean. Informing the discussions, ECLAC Deputy Executive Secretary, Antonio Prado, presented a proposal on a coordinated strategy to address debt reduction for sustainable development in the Caribbean. The timeliness of tackling this issue was underscored by Minister of State for Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade of Jamaica, Arnaldo Brown, who stressed that “the region needs a growth strategy to build productivity” and further underscored that “a major productivity drive is essential.”

The meeting further reviewed progress in implementation of the ongoing work programme of ECLAC in the Caribbean. Over the past 18 months, wide-ranging activities have been undertaken, including extensive research on the state of socioeconomic development in the subregion; strengthening the capacity of governments to assess and respond to disasters through the use of the Damage and Loss Assessment (DaLA) methodology; assisting governments with the development of national trade policies; enhancing the ability of national statistical offices to make most effective use of census data through training in the use of specialized (REDATAM) software; and introducing strategies to improve government efficiency by implementing e-government systems.

Trinidad and Tobago Foreign Affairs Minister, Winston Dookeran, praised these efforts and also thanked ECLAC for its contribution towards building models of Caribbean convergence.

The ECLAC subregional headquarters for the Caribbean serves as the secretariat of the CDCC.  Regular sessions are held every two years, with meetings of the Monitoring Committee convened during the intervening years.