OEA - Informe XIII.2.7 CIDI CIDS INF 3 25 de 2025

SEVENTH REGULAR MEETING OF THE INTER-AMERICAN OEA/Ser.W/XIII.2.7

COMMITTEE ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT CIDI/CIDS/INF.3/25

October 14, 202515 October 2025

OAS Headquarters, Washington, D. C. Original: English

Ruben Dario Room – Hybrid format

REMARKS BY AMBASSADOR SIR RONALD SANDERS, PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE OF ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA DURING THE SEVENTH REGULAR MEETING OF THE INTER-AMERICAN COMMITTEE ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

(Delivered during the Second Plenary Session held on October 14, 2025)

REMARKS BY AMBASSADOR SIR RONALD SANDERS, PERMANENT REPRESENTATIVE OF ANTIGUA AND BARBUDA DURING THE SEVENTH REGULAR MEETING OF THE INTER-AMERICAN COMMITTEE ON SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT

(Delivered during the Second Plenary Session held on October 14, 2025)

Thank you very much, mister chairman, and good morning to you and to colleagues.

Chair, I wondered when would be the appropriate point for me to make the statement, but you've led me into it by your remarks about financing which I listened to with great interest.

And I particularly wanted to make these remarks before we heard from the representatives of CAF, from the Green Climate Fund, from the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance Facility, and the AFREXIMBANK.

Mister chairman, this committee is where we set priorities and assign follow-up. And I'm asking that we do both of those things today.

Antigua And Barbuda is forced to work with high risk and very tight margins because like several other countries around this table, we have been graduated from many concessional windows. But for us, sustainable development is practical:

• It is keeping electricity on after disasters. - It is ensuring that there are schools for children to attend after a storm. - It's about rebuilding infrastructure to keep the economy running, to keep people employed and to keep extreme poverty at bay. - It's also about making sure that debt payments leave fiscal space for us to provide medical services, keep people employed and to pay pensions.

When we hear therefore that the term sustainable development must be struck from documents of the organization of American states, it causes us great alarm because that is sending a signal that there is a knife at our throats.

We can't meet the needs we have to fulfill with vague promises and slow money. Building resilience requires steady investment over decades, not one-off projects. In my country, we have invested in between storms ten to twelve years of hard-earned capital or hard-borrowed money because we are forced to borrow that money at high interest rates with very short repayment periods.

But it can all go as you know, sir, in a matter of minutes. One hurricane hovering over an island for thirty minutes will completely destroy it. That is the extent of our vulnerability. Other people have vulnerability too, but none more than small islands, which have no choice. People can't run anywhere. We can't move anywhere. We have to live under the force of those storms and with the destruction that they cause.

Now financing terms must match capacity. This means we need long maturities, low fixed rates, and automatic payment pauses after disasters. Access to grants and low-cost loans should be based on real vulnerability, not income averages that hide risk.

Like we've heard it said time and again. If Bill Gates were to move into Antigua tomorrow, our GDP would rise so high, everybody would apparently be the richest person on the earth. But the truth is it would only be Bill Gates. The distortion that his arrival in our country would cause would make no difference at all to the poor wages that, and wages that people have to are forced to earn.

Now the UN General Assembly has accepted the multi-dimensional vulnerability index (MVI), on which my country worked extremely hard, with others in the United Nations to get adopted. However, it has not been built into the rules governing lending policies up to this day. And I have to say, sir, that with each passing day, I despair that it might never happen; that we have done all that work, mobilized all that support, come to a common decision in the United Nations General Assembly, but it will not be respected by those who control, the financial institutions of the world. But that gap is blocking fair terms for small states.

Now on how we deliver, we ask our partners, the American Development Bank, CAF, the AFREXIMBANK, the CARICOM Development Fund, CRIF, and the Green Climate Fund to state before the 2026, how much Caribbean funding will they make available and how much of it will be grants versus how much of it will be low-cost loans. We don't have those numbers. We don't have that scenario. We cannot plan. No one can plan without predictability.

We would also welcome standardization of a thirty-year repayment plan with a five-year grace period and pauses in payments when disaster strikes. For years, we have appealed for a dedicated fund for Caribbean transport and basic services. Ports, runways, island ferries, water systems, and small local-power systems. Because without reliable leaks and basic services, other investments will underperform.

I request you, Chair, to ask that the minutes of this meeting be used as follow-ups for the Secretariat and for partners, including those who will speak after me in the next two sessions. All accountability, this committee should publish or try to publish, I know money is short, a short quarter route quarterly report with the following indicators in very plain numbers. The share of high-risk coastline protected by natural or mixed defenses. The typical number of days required for water and power to be restored after a category five storm.

For trade between our countries. Debt service compared to government revenue and the share on grants and low-cost loans.

• How much private money does each public dollar attract? - If it attracts any at all or is it that the burden remains only on public sector financing? - Are we attracting the kind of private sector funding that we need in all our countries?

Because I think everybody will admit that capital formation in our countries from our own banking system is insufficient to finance our development needs. In part, that is why we look for foreign investors and why we look for borrowing on the open market.

It would be good to know how many areas of mangroves and reefs have been restored, if they've been restored at all. And, how many days have to elapse from the declaration of a disaster to the first insurance support payment? This this is critical knowledge for planning and for thinking. If we can't report these, then sir, I'm afraid we are not managing performance.

Now, the Antigua and Barbuda agenda for SIDS, which was adopted, during SIDS, UN SIDS IV in Antigua last year, set clear priorities, economic renewal, climate action and resilience, and fairer international finance. These steps advance the Nassau ministerial decisions.

Now this Committee could help deliver those things by three things I suggest:

1. Creating a small OAS team to help countries prepare standard designs and basic information for coastal defenses, water security, and micro grids. In passing, let me just say this, my island is a drought ridden island. Ten years can go by, and we don't have enough water to fill one dam of water. Now last week, we had tropical storm Jerry. In three hours, we had four inches of rain. What happened to it? All rolled off into the sea. The dams that it managed to fill will not sustain, our needs. The result of which is we spend hard-earned money on desalination plants in order for our people to have portable water; in order to sustain our tourism industry without which we could not live. So, we are spending an awful lot of money to create water Antigua and Barbuda.

People who came to Antigua in June had never been there before for the general assembly had a look at what a small island looks like, struggling to develop and the progress that we have made. But Sir, we have made that progress not because the international financial system has been kind to us. It has not. We have never had a cent of concessional financing from the IMF, the World Bank, or anywhere else since we've been graduated. And that is over fifteen years ago.

We don't have access to climate financing at the scale at which it is necessary to do because the scale of the financing itself is so small to accommodate so great a need that we will have a gap every year, year after year.

1. Now we'd also like to suggest that, posting a simple timeline, that is each commitment, who is responsible for it and the deadline by which they say they will, fulfill it matched to board meetings of the IDB and the green fund might be helpful because at least somebody can monitor whether those obligations were actually met. They can monitor it themselves but we should be able to monitor it too as to whether they fulfill the obligations they said they would undertake.

2. And finally, sir, maintaining a public web page that shouldn't cost a great deal of money, the web page itself. But that web page should be populated with information that tracks commitments, approvals, disbursements, and results. Again, so that we have that information, in order to make decisions.

Now, Mister Chairman, I request that the summary of this meeting, reflect 1) the partner envelopes by, the 2026. In other words, who is who is partnering with whom to do what? 2) The adoption of a quarterly note on those things and the creation of a small OAS preparation team to work on that public timeline page. If we can do some of this, our countries have a better chance to survive and to beat their obligations. And this Committee and the OAS will add some real value to our countries.

I go to Permanent Council meetings and I listen to an awful lot of fluff is how best I could put it, I'm trying to be diplomatic on commemorations. I don't think there's anything we do not commemorate. While we're commemorating things that have gone past, that are of no great value, people are suffering. This Inter-American Committee on Sustainable Development, however, the work here can make a difference to the lives of people; and I hope therefore that it will not be too long before you get a Second Vice Chair.

Thank you very much.

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