A TIME TO CARE
A TIME TO CARE
“As a shepherd seeketh out his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so will I seek out my sheep, and will deliver them out of all places where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day†– Ezekiel 34:12
A visit to New York has always been an inspirational experience for me. My present visit promises to be no less motivating and comes at a time when the United Nations General Assembly is in session. It is a ‘time to care’, a time for world leaders to reflect on the progress made with the Millennium Development Goals. The MDGs are a set of measurable goals set by world leaders at the United Nations Summit in September 2000 to combat poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women.
I had the privilege, in Grenada last Tuesday of spending a few hours in the company of Dr. Noel Brown (a Jamaican) who has now retired as Head of the United Nations Environment Programme. It was a rich experience witnessing his perspective of what I would term ‘economic development, as if the environment really mattered’. He invited me to join him on part of his mission to Grenada the primary purpose of which was to promote an environmentally friendly, quick to construct and hurricane resistant building material. At every intervention that we had on that day, it was very revealing to see how he would weave the thread of environmental concerns to create or enhance the fabric of the project at hand. I hope to continue to benefit when we meet again in New York this week.
On arrival in New York, near to midnight, my son dutifully picked me up from the airport and after the preliminaries he offered me a midnight snack. A TV programme caught my attention. There was a discussion which alluded to the fact that the impact of hurricane Katrina was to further dislocate and suppress the poor but it would provide an opportunity for well established businesses to benefit from the record US$60 billion approved by the US government to begin such a reconstruction and rehabilitation process. This is a similar scenario to the Iraq war, the primary difference is that in the one case the destruction was by an uncontrollable natural disaster and the other was not.
Katrina has resulted in the exacerbation of the wealth divide. The question is: What can be done, in terms of deliberate enterprise development, to reposition some of the dislocated families so that they participate in the reconstruction process and benefit from some of the funds provided? It is a time to care.
In the Caribbean, as indeed in the rest of the world, there is the disaster of ‘rising oil prices’. This has induced higher cost of transportation, higher food prices, higher construction costs (exacerbated by the damage done by Katrina to many ports in the Mississippi river), and higher costs of consumer goods but no real change in economic strategy to protect against consumer consumption. Increasing interest rates alone would not do it. When will the bubble burst? Will we survive the flood of destruction?
Here is a twenty point policy plan for consideration by the social partners.
We must (1) ensure that tourism and its linkages (including ICC WCC 2007) is developed through innovative business strategies which encourage the ‘best and brightest’ to select careers in tourism ‘as the first, and not the last, resort’; (2) not fail to convert the natural competitive advantage of West Indies Sea Island Cotton into a value-added commercial reality; (3) irrevocably zone the remaining agricultural land; (4) admit that sugar cane and its rotation with other crops is the best way to cultivate this land and aggressively and effectively diversify away from commodity sugar; (5) devise real strategies to cut back on consumption; (6) aggressively pursuing renewable energy alternatives; (7) get that ‘consumer protection agency’ to ‘walk the talk’; (8) shepherd enterprise development through an optimal ‘money and management’ mix; (9) focus on innovative ideas, get the business plans prepared, provide the initial seed capital, mobilize managerial expertise, shepherd the entrepreneur; (10) not throw money alone at the problem, it aggravates the entrepreneurial failure rate; (11) optimally utilize the holistic resources in the country; (12) shelve petty jealousies in the interest of national development; (13) process ‘chips on the shoulder’ into bridges for development; (14) bury egos to get them out of the way of development; (15) create an investment syndrome that pervades the entire society; (16) make real estate attractive and within the reach of the emerging work force; (17) actively reduce the wealth divide by making sure that as the rich get richer the poor get richer at a faster rate; (18) induce vested interests to become less myopic and to assume a strategic focus which will benefit the nation as a whole; (19) recognize that the country comes first and that when the country wins we all win; (20) take the social compact, which has been successfully implemented and promoted in Barbados, to another level. It is a time to care.
This week, I look forward to another inspirational session in New York.