BRUSSELS, CMC – CARICOM leaders will hold discussions with their European counterparts in Brussels, Belgium, today, senior EU officials confirmed Friday.
The officials briefing reporters on the two-day EU and the Community of Latin American and the Caribbean States (CELAC) summit said that the deliberations will discuss a number of issues pertinent to the Caribbean region.
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“It’s very important that we keep working with the region as the region presents itself to us,” the officials said, noting that matters such as the Bridgetown initiative, which is being spearheaded by Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley would also be an agenda item for the EU-CELAC summit.
The Bridgetown Initiative is being compared to the Marshall Plan of 1948, when the United States provided more than US$13 billion of foreign aid to help Western Europe recover after World War II.
Barbados has set out three key steps in the Bridgetown Initiative. The first involves changing some of the terms around how funding is loaned and repaid. The aim is to stop developing nations spiraling into a debt crisis when their borrowing is forced up by successive disasters like floods, droughts and storms.
Secondly, Barbados is asking development banks to lend an additional one trillion US dollars to developing countries for climate change resilience, including discounted lending focused on building climate resilience in climate vulnerable countries.
The third step in the Bridgetown Initiative is to set up a new mechanism – with private-sector backing – to fund climate mitigation and reconstruction after a climate disaster..
The two-day EU-CELAC summit, the first in eight years, will be co-chaired by the President of the European Council, Charles Michel, and the St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, who is the pro-tempore Presidency of CELAC.
The officials said that the issue of reparation for slavery will most likely be an agenda item.
