Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders will hold discussions with their European counterparts in Belgium on Monday , senior EU officials confirmed on 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.
“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 spiralling 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 dolars 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.
“We have 60 states that are all signatories of the Durban Declaration with a bit of diplomatic imagination, a solution which recognises this untold suffering is not an impossible ask and I am confident that will not be a stumbling block,” one EU official told the news briefing.
“I think the Durban Declaration also has language in it which takes note of the fact that some stages have both apologised for their actions and payreparations for the suffering caused. So I think this is one of the points where there is still some reflections going on as to how best to capture the spirit of the language of the Durban Declaration that is being ratified by all 60 member states”.
The EU officials regard the summit as a “translation into practical actions of our political commitment to step up our sectoral cooperation with our Latin American and Caribbean partners”
They said it is also to “leverage direct investment in various areas including the green and digital transition, transport, energy infrastructure, health, education and skills and the leaders will also profit from having a discussion on our trade relationship and what we can do to further strengthen our network of trade agreements”.
They said that “global Gateways” would be one of the deliverables from the summit with the EU doubling its funding to US$10 billion.
“We will be seeing more announcements on Monday, member states are coming forward, others are probably keeping their cards close to their chests. We will be unveiling 108 projects in total for the entire region and what we have been doing over the last weeks and months is to work with individual countries to identify priority areas.”
The officials said trade agreements have already been reached with 27 of the 33 CELAC member states.