31st
July 2010
No
trade without help on Undeniable Climate Change
 Climate
change is now undeniable according to a new
study headed by the US National Oceans and Atmospheric
Administration. It is already having a disastrous
effect on small island states. The very existence
of some of them, particularly in the Pacific
and the Indian Ocean, is threatened. Caribbean
islands too are endangered as are countries
such as Belize and Guyana with low lying coastlands.
In the latter case, coastal erosion is reducing
beaches that are crucial to the tourism industry
on which all of the small Caribbean islands
now depend. The Atlantic coasts of both Guyana
and Belize are below sea level, but it accommodates
most of their populations and their agricultural
lands. Sea-level rise, therefore, threatens
all of them.
The challenges that climate change poses to
small states are not only overwhelming, they
are impossible to be met from the scarce resources
of the governments.
In a recent speech in Trinidad and Tobago, the
Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines
put the matter in clear terms when he said:
“In mountainous States like my own, over
80% of our major infrastructure is located along
our coastline, within a few feet of the inexorably
rising seas. The cost of adaptation and preservation
of our infrastructural developments are daunting,
and beyond our individual capacity to address”.
While small states are the primary victims of
climate change, they are the least contributors
to the greenhouse gas emissions that are the
biggest contributors to climate change and global
warming. Together, the harmful emissions of
greenhouse gases from all small states account
for less than 0.1 per cent of the global total.
In a fatuous argument, the US Department of
Energy’s Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis
Centre had rated Trinidad and Tobago at number
9 in the worst emitters of harmful gases in
the world in the year 2007. However, the measurement
was based on population size, not on the volume
of emissions. To underscore the silliness of
the argument, the tiny Caribbean island, Montserrat,
with a population of 10,000 people and no manufacturing
or industrial production of any magnitude, was
rated at number 17 in the world.
The reality is that, despite the per capita
argument that developed countries and international
institutions are fond of using to measure a
range of issues to procure a desired (but illusionary)
result, small states contribute little to global
warming but they are its primary victims as
evidenced by sea-level rise, stronger and more
frequent hurricanes, flooding and other natural
disasters.
These same small states are also the victims
of the worst trading arrangements in the world.
The World Trade Organization (WTO) makes no
provision for their special circumstances, nor
does the International Financial Institutions
(IFIs) such as the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) and the World Bank. Hence, small islands
such as St Lucia (100,000 people) and St Kitts-Nevis
(50,000 people) are treated in the same way
in the WTO as the United States (350 million),
Canada (33 million) or the European Union (400
million). No special rules apply.
In the IFIs, many small states – and certainly
all those in the Caribbean – are “graduated”
from concessional financing because, on the
measurement of per capita income, they are rated
as middle-income countries.
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