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Contact:
John Emmanuel
Thursday, October 02, 2003 - St. Lucia is getting ready to table what is
being described as a bold initiative in Trinidad come next week, as part of the
first preparatory meeting leading up to the Small Island Development States
(SIDS Plus-10 Conference) in 2004.
Close to fifty (50) small island states will meet in Mauritius next year to
review the implementation of the SIDS Programme of Action and make
recommendations on adjustments, to ensure that small-island and low-lying states
move towards sustainable development.
Chief Sustainable Development and Environment Officer in the Ministry of
Physical Development, Environment and Housing Bishnu Tulsie says, St. Lucia has
thus far prepared a first draft of its submission to the conference. “We are
involved with a number of multilateral environmental agreements that have
varying degrees of success. We have done an analysis of these, and realised that
the strength of these initiatives and agreements, lie in the fact that they all
include some sort of support to governments to build national capacity and
institutions to implement these agreements. There is however no such thing for
the SIDS Programme of Action.”
Tulsie says in light of that, St. Lucia will posit the idea that the
international community establish a mechanism that will develop the institutions
and capacities within small island states, to effectively implement the SIDS
Programme of Action. According to him, “It’s a novel idea only because no one
had proposed it before in the context of SIDS, but it has been working in other
agreements like the Montréal Protocol, so why not learn from those experiences
and develop and a similar type of initiative.”
St. Lucia is hoping to gain momentum for the idea first off with support from
other Caribbean countries, then from the Asia Pacific small island states and
the Indian Ocean small island sates, for onward transmission to Mauritius in
2004.
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