In a brief but forceful speech at the High-Level Meeting on Resource Mobilization for SIDS, Valdés Mesa presented Cuba's position without half measures.
"The imbalances in the international financial system do not provide the stability needed to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and address the special needs of SIDS," he denounced.
He said that all the challenges are exponentially exacerbated for Cuba, due to the U.S. economic blockade, and by the arbitrary inclusion of our country in the unilateral list of alleged state sponsors of terrorism."
Regarding the mobilization of resources for SIDS, he mentioned that it is necessary, among other actions:
- Recapitalize the Multilateral Development Banks and improve their lending conditions.
- Strengthen the system of public development banks, with greater capacity and more cooperation between national and multilateral banks, to align their activities with the Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Agreement and the new Antigua and Barbuda Agenda.
- Fulfill once and for all the commitment of developed countries to Official Development Assistance, through allocations based on vulnerabilities, not just income.
- Define SIDS' access to concessional financing and technical cooperation on the basis of criteria beyond Gross Domestic Product, taking into account multidimensional vulnerability.
- Comprehensively review the International Monetary Fund's surcharge policy, including its suspension, significant permanent reduction or elimination.
- Implement a specific debt sustainability support facility for SIDS, involving multilateral, official bilateral and private creditors, under the auspices of the United Nations.
- Redesign debt contracts and instruments to include relief, swap or restructuring clauses in the event of natural catastrophes or macroeconomic shocks.
- Capitalize the Loss and Damage Fund, operationalize the Global Adaptation Goal and establish a new quantified climate finance target that takes into account the priorities and needs of small island developing states.
- Rationalize the role of credit rating agencies, so that they cease to be arbitrators and actors in the same financial market they regulate.
Valdés Mesa stressed that the alternative cannot stick to the recipes of the past.
The only viable solution "lies in rethinking the unjust and unequal international economic order and the current bases that define North-South relations and life on the planet".
