PM Mottley: Per capita income is useless... a lazy metric to determine eligibility for access to funding for financing development and the climate crisis
Moderator: Prime Minister Mottley, we have heard from you and from the Secretary General over the course of the past many years, speak about how unjust the current international financial system is, what meaningful shifts in the international financial architecture are required to achieve a just future for countries who, like the SIDS, are on the front lines of the climate crisis.
Prime Minister Mottley’s response:
Thank you very much, Courtney, and let me thank you and my brother Gaston for this opportunity and for hosting us so wonderfully. Whether we like it or not, the issue remains the same.
Using per capita income to determine eligibility for access to funding for financing development and the climate crisis is the equivalent of using my blood pressure reading from two years ago to determine if I will get a heart attack today. It is useless, and as long as economists and the international financial system continue to use a lazy metric that is highly inappropriate to determine the vulnerability of Antigua or Dominica or St. Kitts or Barbados, it means that you are not seeing us, you are not hearing us, and you are prepared to render a situation where climate migration will be the future of those of us because we will not be able to survive in our islands if we have to choose. You cannot finance education and health with 15-year loans, and we have an international financial system that pushes us in that direction.
My brother Ralph will not forgive me if I did not speak from here as to the consequences of seeking to move countries like St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Dominica, Grenada, and St. Lucia out of the bottom base of IDA funding so that they will be required to pay greater interest rates at the same time as they wonder what 2024 hurricane season will bring to them. It is wrong, and you cannot use the excuse of difficulty to avoid doing what is right. I'm just going to stay on that one point of per capita income in your three minutes.
Thank you.
Moderator: Thank you very much, PM.