The climate survival game

If both the climate crisis and the pandemic have taught us one thing it is that we are mistaken if we believe, as Barbados PM Mia Mottley put it, that “national solutions can solve global problems.”

In other words, the best advice is to avoid self-delusion, after having conceded that there indeed exists an existential threat to our survival as a sovereign small island state. We cannot do this alone. A long view of history would speak of the decimation, through a variety of different circumstances, of grand empires occupying infinitely larger geographical spaces than ours.

Unfortunately, there are those who walk among us who don’t share such a belief. They emerge from the swamp of ignorance from time to time. This pandemic period is one example. But climate change scepticism is of more durable vintage and at the core is a lack of belief in science.

I have seen, for instance, social media challenges to the value of a T&T presence in Glasgow alongside key AOSIS and Small Island Developing States (SIDS) allies on the grounds of some kind of retreat from domestic reality.

Such doubt also exists in the pregnant silence of opinion-leaders fresh from campaigns of COVID denial, resistance to pandemic measures and tacit promotion of vaccine hesitancy. To them, climate change scepticism is not that remote a concept.

We would also do well to recognise unequal international status, whatever our grandiose self-assessment. The fact is, at the root of much of the discussions and negotiations in Glasgow today, are the disproportionate levels of victimisation involving the wealthy and powerful, as opposed to the small and the under-resourced.

These important differentials lie at the heart of some important but highly problematic instruments designed by the global community to mitigate further damage and deterioration in areas such as the Caribbean.

For example, access to climate financing is now linked, since the Paris Agreement of 2015, to nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to fighting climate change. Following a programme of serious work, an indicative version of this has been prepared by T&T and others for the current conference.

The G20 Leaders’ Summit in Rome ahead of Monday’s COP26 inaugural session however side-stepped key issues including a clear deadline for net zero carbon emissions, and basically agreed (having previously failed to do so) to raise US$100 billion to help fund mitigation efforts in countries such as ours. PM Mottley thinks this is far less than what is required or even possible.

The problem is continued delays in prompt action belie the fact that the processes of nature set in train, now undeniably through human activity, are already considered to be irreversible. The urgent goal of capping the rise in global temperatures to no more than 1.5% over current levels in order to “stay alive” is an increasingly unreachable target.

The existence of an Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) however indicates acceptance of the fact that we cannot do this on our own, and that there are fellow travellers in whom there exist key commonalities.

As co-author of a Caribbean journalism handbook on “the climate crisis”, I have also been warned of the “alarmist” impact of employment of the word “crisis.” Well, dear friends, if climate change does not constitute an unfolding crisis for countries that are small, surrounded by the ocean, and still engaged in finding feet of their own in the development process, then what is?

T&T/Jamaica scientist Dr Rebekah Shirley has offered a menu of subjects for consideration by the AOSIS community. On the front burner, she proposes, ought to be political efforts to prioritise negotiations on adaptation, loss, and damage; commitments for blended forms of adaptation finance; and consensus on a carbon market mechanism.

Countries such as ours also have a vested interest in moving the developed world from elaborately expressed commitment to action. However, there were mixed reviews out of Rome regarding the prospects for realisation of such goals. This made the working sessions in Glasgow far more worthy of attention than the impressive speeches.

My friend and ACM science advisor, Steve Maximay, often advises against deployment of the “we go dead” approach. But the science may well conclude that as small island states faltering in our aspirations for true sovereignty, extinction is actually not a figuratively remote scenario.

Resilience, the pandemic, and climate change

(Published in the T&T Guardian on October 6, 2021)

By now, just two days later, many of us would have already succumbed to some degree of budget fatigue.

It has occurred to me that budget processes in parliament, media and other public spaces have become so predictable and routinised politically, that some news stories are capable of being assembled in advance, barring precise figures and measures.

 

The issues that attract the most attention often remain the stuff of sterile annual ritual.

 

The event however has the potential to guide attention and awareness to broader developmental challenges and goals that ought to properly engage the microeconomics, but often doesn’t.

 

Take, for example, the perils of climate change (the “climate crisis” being a better formulation). Comb the budget presentation for specific mention. True, there is. In bits and scattered pieces - shorelines, carbon capture and electric cars. But there’s a bigger story.

 

It’s also there in the implementation, but only in implicit increments of preventative measures and remedies – shorelines to safeguard, watercourses to excavate, proper infrastructure planning to engage, livelihoods to protect, and adaptive measures to minimise natural and social harm from changing climatological conditions.

 

In less than a month from now, we will be asked to parade these otherwise muted elements of our development before the world at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland.

 

It is conceivable that the budget statement could have been presented against the backdrop of more than one urgent context to include the climate crisis. For, even when the pandemic challenge is mostly over (though I think the virus will be with us in some form for many years to come) there will remain questions of viability linked to climate change.

 

At COP26, for instance, we will be expected to draw attention to this country’s Carbon Reduction Strategy. Such a strategy identifies core actions linked to what is prescribed under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as our (intended) Nationally Determined Contribution (iNDC) to global carbon targets.

 

There is a lot more to this but, in short, our intention as a country is to reduce emissions from power generation, transportation, and industry by up to 15% by 2030. It is expected that the net cost of this would be in the order of US$2 billion. None of this was heard on Monday. Let’s listen on Friday and in the days that follow.

 

People currently arguing over Mr Imbert’s budget measures should pay attention to this, if only to appreciate the processes being engaged and to assess the prospects for achieving such targets, given the financing needs and the channels through which international funding is accessible.

 

Monday was also significant for us because even as the finance minister was attempting to reassure us that financial ruin is not yet upon the nation, the UN Secretary-General was a half hour flight away from here, in Barbados, addressing the opening of the 15^th United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in rather dim tones.

 

It was well worth lending the event an eye and ears as world governments mulled prospects for achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals in tandem with the climate change agenda by 2030.

 

The pandemic has provided a massive barrier to realisation of most of this, especially in the case of poor and middle-income countries. Small island developing states such as T&T ought to be paying much closer attention to such a state of affairs despite relative economic strength in our case.

 

The Caribbean region, as a whole, is pretty much broke. It is a reality we in T&T ignore at our peril – as with the collapse of Venezuela.

 

If the Barbados UNCTAD is significant for one purpose, it would be that it merges the multiplicity of challenges into a single prognosis spanning a spectrum of hope and hopelessness.

 

The asymmetrical impacts of the pandemic, for example, concur alongside varying regional abilities and disabilities, including our collective capacity to prevail in the face of the climate crisis.

 

The national budget, climate and our pandemic conditions are absolutely linked. The long view requires steps toward resilience that span the pandemic and beyond.

 

Life Sentences

Though I “passed” for QRC as a student of Curepe Presbyterian, I spent almost all my primary school life at Caroni Presbyterian – a small, U-shaped, red-brick structure in the middle of a lush canefield.

I grew up near UWI in St Augustine with a misty morning view of Mt St Benedict. But it was the grazing bison of Caroni, the sharp green leaves of the sugarcane and razor-grass, and the clackety-clack of the cane train that remain among my most enduring primary school memories.

True, one day I saw a donkey being mercilessly beaten as it reluctantly drew a cart full of grass or sugarcane. Five and a half decades later, I still hear the crack of that whip on thick, defenceless hide.

My grandfather, as Caroni headmaster, would deliver assembly speeches that spoke of man’s inhumanity to man, justice, equality, and the responsibilities of independence.

“The test of a man is the fight that he makes,/The grit that he daily shows,/The way he stands upon his feet,/And takes life’s numerous bumps and blows.” There I was at Queen’s Hall – hair shiny and gripping my scalp, powder on my face and chest, clothes crisp and clean, onstage, hands clasped, making Grandpa proud.

Contrastingly, the Curepe experience became quickly queued for exit from memory. There is some fogginess surrounding those few months. A sadistic teacher who threw a duster at a student. A girl who fell on her way upstairs and busted her lip. And Jean Jacques who overturned a desk and cussed the duster-throwing teacher.

But it was there I sat the Common Entrance Examination and “passed” for QRC. A relative of mine had sat and “failed” two years before.

Was it possible that the “bright boy” from Caroni would follow? I didn’t. But there were those who had “failed” and subsequently disappeared, unlike my relative who went on to become a quite accomplished professional.

There were many tales to be told of the cruelty of Common Entrance at that time. How come Angela “failed”? And Rajin and Egbert? Whatever happened to them? What were their life sentences?

At QRC we were trained to forget all that. On the first day, our form teacher said the secondary school experience was about learning and applying knowledge and was not about examinations and passing.

This was, I presumed, a perverse form of therapy to help us forget those who had gone from view, and the depravities we had witnessed.

We were left wondering what accounted for this leap from cruelty to what appeared to have been a new reality. Of course, it was all a lie. GCE turned out to be just as frantic and despairing. But that’s another story. I will someday come to that.

Then, many years later, came the grand transition from the Common Entrance to SEA – a process presumably guided by work that blended data, enlightened, learned contemplation, and political will. It was all there in the press releases!

However, there were serious educationists who remained silently sceptical and others who wrote about virtual sleight of hand. Children, you see, were still effectively “passing” or “failing” or being forgotten.

Social psychologist, Prof. Ramesh Deosaran has written about the “humanitarian violation” resulting from the combined effects of the SEA and the presence of “Concordat-governed schools.”

I also have a copy of educationist Prof. Jerome De Lisle’s paper on Secondary School Examinations in the Caribbean. In it, he surmises that the current system “ignores the measurement limitations of high-stakes achievement tests, the threat of unintended consequences, and the inequalities in opportunities to learn that persist throughout the system.”

In essence, these two experts are rendering bare what some of us untrained observers have long suspected. That though the donkey carts have gone away, and the dusters unlikely to be released with force at students, there is an underlying cruelty that persists together with verdicts that span a long time – life sentences.

Latterly, those who note the move in Barbados to abolish the Common Entrance are these days barely recognising the differences SEA ostensibly produced. They do so even as they call for its corresponding withdrawal here.

The important differences between the two systems to combat the fallibility of “test-based early selection”, as De Lisle once noted, have apparently not relieved the pain they were meant to ameliorate.

This is among the things these new times cannot fail to address. I am not hearing much from all concerned to engender the required confidence.

 

Natural Caribbean Unity and Haiti

Entering the Haitian discourse at this time is fraught with perils of all kinds. For starters, the subject is emotionally and ideologically linked to the country’s cruel treatment at the hands of unconscionable colonials and is underlined by a recurring suggestion of geo-political victimhood.

Everywhere last week, for instance, David Rudder’s poetic commentary on a misunderstanding involving a Haitian taxi driver in New York was sounded as a predictable anthem on the theme of perpetual nightmare.

Now, be clear, there are competent observers who have never set foot in the country but are able to capture the gist of a situation in which heavy odds are stacked even against the most noble aspirations. But being there (as I have, more than once) can fill important gaps in understanding flavours not readily available in the videos or texts.

Even more, institutionalising a relationship rooted in history and ethnic solidarity – as has been the case between Haiti and Caricom since 2002 - takes you closer to an understanding of dynamics not otherwise readily accessible.

For, even as the late CLR James was able to match the revolution-to-revolution advances in Haiti, France, and Russia in The Black Jacobins, he was unable, in a 1958 speech in Guyana – to easily attach “natural unity” to relations between Haiti and some parts of the Commonwealth Caribbean.

The awkwardness had also been on display before and after 2002. Not only in the form of linguistic inconvenience – except for the Saint Lucians and Dominicans – but through the practicalities of public service culture and the persistence of political unreliability and dysfunctionality.

I recall the Port-au-Prince discussions of 1994, upon the return of deposed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, when our offer of (British) colonial public service assistance was extended to his bureaucrats, and their polite (but never seriously pursued) response.

It has since not been an easy ride. There are people in senior diplomatic Caribbean circles who agree that Haitian membership of Caricom was far more the stuff of irrational ideological fantasy than pragmatic self-preserving diplomacy.

Such emotions were roused last December when the OAS Permanent Council permitted Venezuelan participation, despite the country’s withdrawal from the body in 2017. Its “representative” went on to defame the people and government of T&T over the drowning of 16 Venezuelans (in Venezuelan waters) in an incident that November. Haiti, Jamaica, and The Bahamas were not among the Caricom countries to firmly resist an associated resolution.

Our country is yet to fully recover from the diplomatic slur, despite continuing public protestations by Caribbean diplomats. This quite recently earned ambassador Ronald Sanders of Antigua and Barbuda the public derision and disrespect of his Haitian OAS counterpart.

Now, this is not to suggest that Haiti’s current crisis is any less our business, as has been suggested (even through silence) on some fronts. It is in fact a situation in which Caricom, almost exclusively, has the potential to bear the torch of honest broker.

T&T’s declining regional leadership over the past ten of so years can, in fact, be retrieved through enlightened engagement of the Haiti challenge within Caricom.

The political vacuum created by Moïse’s assassination – together with all the associated issues surrounding the legitimacy of his tenure and subsequent appointments - calls for supple diplomatic hands. The events predating the assassination of Haitian President Jean Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915, and those that followed, should not be forgotten. The ensuing US occupation of Haiti did not end until 1934.

This is not to fuel any conspiracy theory regarding what happened at the Moïse household on July 7. There are numerous suspicions. Yet, Caricom, as an interested party, has a unique role to play in facilitating a climate of reconciliation both within and without Haiti. The regional body cannot be left out of the equation, whatever the current internecine discomforts.

As part of the regional grouping, Haiti can no longer be described as a mere neighbour since it occupies important, if not uncomfortable, space in our house. But it would help us all to recognise our limitations as well as the quality of the familial arrangements.

We must also know that all of this is not going to be as simple as saying we’re all sorry.

 

Among the ranks of the forgotten

Much to my chagrin, nobody accused me of jumping the queue when COVID-19 vaccine doses were first offered to “the elderly” at the end of March as the first modest COVAX shipment arrived.

What ever happened to “you does look good for your age” and all that? True, I had myself listened attentively for a precise definition of the designation (“the elderly”) when it was clear that anticipated slow vaccine supplies would invariably require an age/health condition hierarchy for administering such protection.

I had already been through the National Insurance drill which sets parameters involving two milestones – (i) reaching 60 and (ii) realising that you are 65 and should not be working so hard.

No, I am not yet at phase two, thank you. I, in fact, made it to phase one three years ago

But youthful myopia – both as private individuals and as states - has you feeling your time never comes.

There is a parallel with an exchange I had with a politically appointed senior energy advisor some years ago who advised that T&T should not worry about oil and gas reserves “running out.”

“As long as the planet remains viable, we will have oil,” he said.

Then, you reach 60, and the TTARP card you got at 50 is no longer a social media joke and you have worked overseas, and freelanced, and people had your NIS number all mixed up and you realise you are pretty much among those “Scottie” James O’Neil Lewis described as the officially “forgotten”.

“One gets the impression,” the late diplomat told me 21 year ago, “there is a feeling that people are living too long.”

Relatedly, it was my father, many years before this, explaining to me exactly what a late friend of his did professionally as an “actuary”.

As an insurance man, Dad expressed much of this in measures of financial risk. Among the things he told me was that his friend had more than once expressed concern about the eventual “bunching” of both private and state benefits to the elderly.

Sooner or later, he surmised, the country’s ability to sustain largely non and partially contributory support for those who had reached the final phases of their lives would be depleted, especially within the context of a country where there is a widening gap between the young and an increasing number of old people who are tending to live longer and longer.

Such a revelation more than 40 years ago came to mind when I read Raphael John-Lall’s Sunday Guardian interview with gerontologist, Dr Jennifer Rouse.

“The last cohort of the “baby boomer” generation, those born between 1946 and 1964, are due to retire in 2024, followed closely by the Generation X-ers, a significant number of who are contract workers,” the article says.

To locate specific political responsibility for such an oversight is particularly problematic. Current protestations over the inevitability of extending the retirement age to 65, for purposes of NIS benefits, ought not to include a partisan flavour if people are inclined to be honest. Nobody seemed to seriously note what had been happening – multiple studies and seminars later.

An IPS feature published in my name in 1999 points to the fact that 21 years ago there had been concern by people such as Rouse and others that by the year 2005, people over the age of 60 would have accounted for 20 percent of the population – a situation that will eventually bring into jeopardy the ability of the state system to continue payment of benefits, at set levels, to the aged.

Today’s actual statistic for the elderly is closer to 15 percent, but it persists at a time when the stresses of the pandemic period are accentuating the impact of seriously compromised macro-economic conditions, and the fact of an ageing population.

The options remain limited. I can’t see how we can escape an effort to protect the integrity of national insurance as a reliable source of support to the aged. The real issue, though, would be to assure us that “we” won’t be consigned to the ranks of the forgotten.

There is evidence that a measure of forgetting occurs. There are even those who believe some culling during this crisis might well be a blessing in disguise. The words of Dr O’Neil Lewis bear repeating: “There is a feeling that people are living too long.” Are we?

 

The agony of labour

In case you hadn’t noticed, it was Labour Day last Saturday. A stark Rishi Ragoonath photograph on page 7 of the Sunday Guardian virtually told the entire June 19 story – but mainly, and perhaps only, to those who have walked the Fyzabad trail.

As a 1980s labour reporter I made the walk several times. When I looked around then, it was hard to tell the difference between the journalists covering the annual event and the trade union members celebrating it – except we did not typically join in the singing, or bear placards.

I believe we all knew at the time that our marching with the celebrants represented much more than “coverage”, even though our demeanour would change, and our press passes become more openly displayed once we reached the bandstand and the speeches we could have reported on, even before hearing them.

Even so, we were realising that more than 40 years following the advent of modern trade unionism in T&T, the broad developmental role of the labour movement had begun to change. Oil and gas wealth was transforming the land and peoplescape. The politics had evolved. A new status quo had begun to take effect, within which unions held a fixed spot.

Political parties with any kind of popular support were moving further and further away from the interests of organised labour - save for the 1975/1976 version of the ULF. Neither the PNM nor the UNC can lay claim to sleepless nights over such matters.

Since those days, union membership has also shrunk to the extent that, today, under 20 percent of the working population is represented by a labour union – some of them undemocratic and dysfunctional.  

This has rendered a notion of tripartism marginal to essential questions of the social and economic well-being of the country. Had this been otherwise, the withdrawal of the three (yes, three) trade union federations from the National Tripartite Advisory Council would have had a far more seismic impact on today’s state of pandemic affairs.

Instead, nobody recognises any real change in the dynamics of public discourse or action.

Economist Vanus James was even moved to declare on the weekend that the interests of workers are now more appropriately placed in the hands of employers that are, in turn, reliant on state support for a more vibrant business environment.

“The mechanisms you need to support workers (are) through their jobs in the private sector,” he is quoted as saying.

Even so, Dr James acknowledged the value of both SMEs and the medium to large enterprise sectors. He however did not remind us (though he knows) that the state, in all its manifestations, is the single largest employer in the country, and that the informal sector will continue to grow, especially under current conditions, as a largely unrepresented employment cohort.

So, where do trade unions enter the picture? They represent a small and declining minority of workers. Their interests are not clearly aligned to the unrepresented majority. There is also no coherent, joint developmental agenda in the face of a pandemic that has severely reduced private and public financial resources, and led to a loss of jobs and economic opportunity.

Yet, enlightened trade unions can be among the most valuable assets in protecting the interests of workers wherever they are found by helping to define the terms of engagement involving a dominant state, a self-centred private sector, and the population.

Very little about this is included in the reporting of the Post-COVID Roadmap to Recovery. Not much more from anyone else has also portrayed a future in which commerce, industry, and finance can sustain and enrich us all through productive engagement of the country’s most important resource.

There are, in fact, no “good old days” of trade unionism to which there should be a return. What we have are different times that are serving to re-focus a lethargic, complacent, and arguably incapable labour movement.

A new social compact is clearly insufficient to our needs if we do not move forward from tripartism to a new multipartism more closely aligned to current realities.

Under such conditions, trade unions may find more relevant space. If they are concerned. If they are willing. If they are able. The agony of labour confronts us all.

 

Caricom’s next steps

June 9, 2021 

Wesley Gibbings

On August 15, Belizean diplomat, economist, and former politician, Dr Carla Barnett, will take over at the Caricom Secretariat in Georgetown at a time when a combination of all three skillsets of hers, and more, will be required to navigate the integration movement safely through the most perilous period in its 48-year history.

If the pandemic challenge has proven one thing, it is that the brittle post-colonial substructures of the movement require extensive excavation and refurbishment.

This goes beyond the discrete institutional pillars of economic integration, human and social development, foreign policy coordination, and security. For, in the end, all of these would need to be fundamentally repurposed.

They have certainly proven to be near useless in this crisis, not in the direct sense of a role in regional public health coordination through CARPHA, for instance, (though there is a lot to be said here) but as cohesive mechanisms to manage the general well-being of the region at a time of urgent need.

It took 28 years to revise the 1973 Treaty of Chaguaramas. Further changes are needed 20 years later. Among the first tasks would be to reformulate its architecture and to decide who is coming along for the rest of this long ride.

Jamaica has already determined an exit route. The Bahamas has persistently kept at least one foot outside. And Haiti has not always displayed good neighbourliness - whatever our own negligence toward a country whose chaotic entry into the fraternity has never been reconciled.

These three come to mind particularly in the aftermath of last November’s OAS vote on Venezuela when T&T fell victim to a disrespectful, cynical lie. This is hard to forget or to forgive. I have mentioned other disappointments in past columns. This one though …

Meanwhile, the Caricom “travel bubble” popped early because the promise of a greater protective/nurturing mechanism for social, economic, political, and cultural resilience had already ruptured in our faces.

At each turn, it has mostly been everybody for themselves, rendering invalid the prospects for meaningful, joint action in the application of health and travel protocols, the coordinated acquisition of vaccines, and a single, resilient face and voice before the world.

It has also been impossible to tidily compartmentalise even the most specialised functions of the state in addressing a crisis that is taking lives and leaving growing numbers in despair, pain of all varieties, and facing death. How is COVID-19 not as much a regional security question as it is a public health challenge?

In T&T, for instance, we are learning too slowly yet surely that the pandemic is not solely a matter for a ministry of health.

Against such a backdrop, Dr Barnett, together with interested regional leaders, would do well to dispassionately assess all regional options for survival. However, engaging the massive tasks will require institutional assets the Caricom bureaucratic establishment and its associated institutions do not currently possess or are able to harness.

For example, the Caricom Secretariat is not a modern organisation within the meaning of 21^st century institutions of its kind. If Dr Barnett does not understand this, she will go nowhere with any of the aspirations she has already found the time to identify.

By August 15, people in all member states should know her well. It is not in the stock of the professional instincts of public servants to pursue such an objective. Her predecessor proved the point.

But Dr Barnett has fought elections, sat in the senate of Belize, and traded punches with the best during assignments spanning different political administrations. Media shyness will thus not be treated with magnanimity.

She is also a former deputy Secretary-General of Caricom who knows the ins and outs of the Georgetown arrangements.

There is much work to be done. Caricom’s “open regionalism” as a way of engaging the rest of the world is up for frank review. Existing institutions need to be evaluated and rationalised.

There are those out there foolish enough to believe that any of us can set sail on our own or cleave to perceived opportunities not borne out of our own realities. There are others who believe we can make a future for ourselves and generations to come, right here. Dr Barnett has, as part of her unwritten terms of reference, the task of steering countries and people in such a direction.