Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, 2007

It is with a profound sense of anticipation

that I welcome Mr. Kerim’s assumption of the

presidency of the General Assembly at its sixty-second

session. In accepting the presidency, he succinctly

outlined an exciting raison d’être for a modern, active

and engaged United Nations, namely, a focus on

multilateral cooperation to combat the challenges of

globalization, climate change, terrorism, immigration

and sustainable development. I have every confidence

that, under his enlightened presidency, the General

Assembly will fashion positive, tangible and creative

solutions to those global challenges.

Our recent history has taught us that triumphalist,

imperialist unilateralism is a consistent cause, but an

infrequent solution, to the problems confronting

today’s world. But it is at this moment, as the

philosophy of unilateralist misadventure is in its death

throes, that a modern, multilateral United Nations must

seize the day, fill the vacuum and live up to the noble

and immutable principles of its Charter. That modern

and multilateral United Nations, under Mr. Kerim’s

presidency, should never sacrifice principle for an

ignoble practicality, but should instead be suffused

with a fairness that views the world through the eyes

not of imperial tsars, indifferent diplomats or apathetic

agencies to whom suffering is but a television event

easily erased with the flick of a remote-control

button but through the eyes of the vast majority of

the world’s citizens, who struggle daily for survival,

who dodge bullets in their backyards, who coax a

meagre living from parched and exhausted soils and

who have been globalized to the brink of extinction. It

is not idealistic or naive to assert that engaged, fair and

genuinely concerned States working together can solve

the seemingly intractable problems besetting our

imperfect planet. Our problems are largely man-made;

so too are the solutions.

The recent focus by the United Nations on the

issue of climate change and global warming is a

welcome development. It is the prayer of humankind

that this belated momentum has not come too late to

reverse the damage already inflicted on our planet.

After all, we are short-term caretakers of the Earth, and

it is our sacred duty to preserve it for future

generations. This is a great cause of our time, and we

must not be timid or doubtful in the face of any great

cause.

I would like to remind the General Assembly that,

15 years ago, the 1992 United Nations Framework

Convention on Climate Change recognized that global

warming would have a special impact on small States,

countries with low-lying coastal areas and countries

with areas prone to natural disasters. In Saint Vincent

and the Grenadines, for example, the overwhelming

majority of our hard-won infrastructural developments,

by way of geographic necessity, lie mere inches above

sea level and perilously close to the coastline. Through

absolutely no fault of our own, the physical

manifestations of our emerging post-colonial State can

be obliterated by inexorably rising sea levels.

The Caribbean’s vital banana industry, already

buffeted by the winds of iniquitous globalization, has

been repeatedly devastated in recent years by

increasingly intense hurricanes, which have placed a

hitherto dominant economic sector on veritable life

support. In any event, the environmental damage

caused in producing quality bananas for the European

Community over the recent decades is ignored by those

whose consumerist demands engender further

environmental damage.

The solutions to the problem of climate change

are multifaceted, but an indispensable component must

be the adoption by the States parties to the United

Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change of

the climate change Adaptation Fund for

environmentally challenged African, Asian, Caribbean,

Latin American and Pacific States. The Fund would put

flesh on the skeletal commitments of the Convention

on Climate Change, which compelled developed

countries to provide additional financial resources to

assist developing countries that are particularly

vulnerable to the adverse effects of global warming.

The Fund should be a source both of disaster relief and

of the technological and infrastructural support needed

to adapt to climate change.

The developed States Members of the United

Nations can no longer afford to view the increasingly

frequent and intense natural disasters as individual

events, capable of narrow prescriptive solutions and

subject to the vagaries of donor fatigue. They must live

up to their obligations, both legal and moral, to assist

the developing world in dealing with challenges that

were born in the smoke-belching factories and

car-clogged highways of the polluters.

The quest for energy self-sufficiency and

environmentally friendly energy consumption has led

to a rush towards the production of ethanol in some

countries. This, however, requires careful thought and

sensible implementation. For example, the use of corn

to produce ethanol is driving up the price worldwide of

grain, beef, chicken and milk. The poor will suffer

unless a prudently balanced approach is adopted. The

United Nations has a vital role to play in that regard.

As a proud citizen of the Republic of Macedonia,

the President is all too familiar with the terrors

wrought by wars born of ethnic conflict. It is my

earnest prayer that his personal experience will lend

urgency to what has been the seemingly heartless

neglect on the part of the United Nations, in practical

terms, of the genocidal campaign being waged in

Darfur. While recent developments including the

Security Council resolution 1769 (2007), authorizing

the establishment of the African Union-United Nations

Hybrid Operation in Darfur, and the recent

appointments of Rodolphe Adada as the Joint African

Union-United Nations Special Representative for

Darfur and General Martin Luther Agwai as Force

Commander are somewhat encouraging, let us not

delude ourselves: the force on the ground is still

insufficient, its mandate is ambiguous and its emerging

presence is years too late. For too long we have looked

the other way. We in the United Nations have caused

the world to wonder about the relative worth of a

Sudanese or Rwandan life versus an Israeli, Chinese,

American or European life. What is happening in

Darfur is genocide. Let us call it what it is. The United

Nations must remain committed to alleviating the

suffering of the men, women and children of Darfur.

In the same vein, the Government and people of

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines stand unequivocally

with the people of Myanmar in their current struggle

for democracy and life without tyranny.

The drama of war, the fight against global

terrorism, insecurity and poverty, the struggle for

reparation for the descendants of African slaves in the

New World and the insidious impacts of climate

change must continue to hold the collective attention of

the General Assembly. But there are other eminently

avoidable ills afflicting the developing world that also

demand our focus. The Caribbean faces the worst

epidemic of chronic non-communicable disease in the

Americas. In 2004, the six leading causes of death in

the Caribbean were heart disease, cancer, diabetes,

stroke, injuries and hypertensive disease each of

which claimed more lives in the region than

HIV/AIDS.

That looming health crisis, although largely self-

inflicted, has an obvious global component.

Globalization has spawned a creeping cultural

hegemony and homogeneity with a distinct mass-

consumption bias. Our home-grown Caribbean culture

and our Caribbean civilization are being challenged

and undermined by a shallow consumer ethic driven by

multinational corporations whose sole interest is to

create a standardized population of global purchasers.

The explosion in media and information technology,

for all its obvious benefits, has been an all-too-willing

handmaiden to that cultural invasion. The

homogenized, vapid and consumerist culture of the

multinationals’ empire is exported worldwide, beamed

directly to our computers, televisions, newspapers and

cinema screens. It is devoid of context, yet rich in

subtext. Its message, in a nutshell, is simple: our

culture, our civilization, is better than yours. It is a

subliminal message that too many of our people have

unfortunately been accepting at a faster rate than the

ability of our health care systems to adapt. Colonialist,

imperialist, mindless and homogenizing globalization

has wrought havoc. Its deleterious contemporary

manifestations must be resolutely resisted.

The acceptance of a core of universal human

values does not mean a submission to the consumerism

of any empire. A quest by some to establish a global

hegemony in everything will never be able to erase or

subjugate the legitimacy of the particularity of

civilizations, including our Caribbean civilization. In

that context, the call for an alliance of civilizations has

our support. It is likely to be more uplifting and

enduring than a quest for dominance by one over the

other.

The erosion of trade preferences at the

multilateral level has brought with it new challenges to

the small and vulnerable economies of the Caribbean,

requiring Governments to engage in structural

adjustments and fiscal calisthenics to keep our

economies afloat. At the same time, the development

deliverables that the Doha Round promised to our

countries which, like the Biblical manna, are

urgently needed for our sustenance have yet to

materialize, owing to the floundering negotiations of

that Round. Let us recall that the first and last of the

Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) speak,

respectively, to the eradication of poverty and to global

partnership for development. But for small and

vulnerable economies the attainment of those two goals

will be significantly compromised if the multilateral

trade rules and provisions are not sufficiently

accommodating to the special needs of countries like

ours.

Special and differential treatment for developing

countries is vital to offset the potential losses that are

occasioned by globalization and the liberalization of

markets. That is why aid-for-trade and a mobilization

of resources must be on the agenda of multilateral

organizations, to be used as an instrument for

economic growth and capacity-building in developing

countries. The recent launch of the MDG call to action

by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is an

initiative that my Government supports, and it may

well act as a much-needed spur to get us back on track

to achieving the MDGs by the target date of 2015.

Saint Vincent and the Grenadines yet again pleads

with the United Nations to permit Taiwan to be

accorded its rightful admission to the United Nations

and its specialized agencies. Taiwan, a democratic and

progressive country of 23 million people, remains a

legitimate and vibrant political expression of the

ancient and magnificent Chinese civilization. There is

no adequate justification for the continued exclusion of

Taiwan from participation in the numerous global

exchanges in the United Nations and other

international bodies. We urge Secretary-General Ban

Ki-moon to accept and deal with Taiwan’s membership

application in accordance with the Charter. Taiwan

possesses all the attributes and qualifications for

membership of the United Nations. Let it therefore be

done. Furthermore, the United Nations must play its

role in reducing tensions across the Taiwan Strait.

Aggressive conduct must be restrained in a context

where Taiwan is committed to peace and a

comprehensive political dialogue.

I shall conclude as the Assembly President began,

by urging swift and effective multilateral action to

tackle the challenges of the modern world. As the

Cuban poet and national hero José Martí once said, “It

is a sin not to do what one is capable of doing”. By that

measure, the sins of omission and commission of the

United Nations are manifold and manifest, despite its

successes. Our collective multilateral and principled

penance must be measured even more by our actions

from this day onward. We must therefore now act

together on each of the world’s enduring challenges.

Each nation and each person has a vital role to play. An

arrogance born of triumphalism that seeks to exclude

so many who look askance at an imperial agenda must

cease. The master poet from Martinique, Aime Cesaire,

addresses this issue well in his famous Cahier d’un

retour au pays natal:

No race has a monopoly on beauty, on

intelligence, on strength ... There is room for

everyone at the convocation of conquests ... We

know now that the sun turns around our Earth,

lighting the parcel designated by our will alone ...

[and that] every star falls from sky to Earth at our

omnipotent command.