CARICOM HEADS MUST GET A REALITY CHECK

Hurricane Beryl  bore down on the West Indies and created havoc over the past week in Barbados, in Grenada and in St Vincent and the Grenadines.  It also affected St Lucia, Dominica and Jamaica.  The Caricom heads met on Friday past and determined that once again they had to spend monies which they did not have to repair the damage.  In this respect, there is nothing different about the hurricane response than the response over the last fifty years.  Housing destroyed, GDP badly dented and we go to the markets to borrow and find ourselves deeper in debt.  The Caricom heads need a reality check.  The answer is resilience.  We need to make sure that we get the money to build back a proper housing stock and better sea defences and flood defences.  If we do that successfully then it will be easier to respond to the loss and damage. In fact, it will be minimal but we seem in this region to have a penchant for complaining about the state of affairs, describing the state of affairs but not doing anything about it.