Saint Lucia Strongly Supports Concept of Caribbean Programming Fund

Contact: John Emmanuel  

Wednesday, October 31, 2001 - The involvement of the region’s public and private sectors in establishing a common programming fund is critical to restoring the culture, values and identity of Caribbean people. That’s the view being expressed by Barbados’s Education Minister Honourable Mia Mottley. She was speaking recently to regional media managers at a Caribbean Broadcasting Union (CBU) sponsored seminar, on Broadcasting and Its Role in Regional Integration.

According to Mottley, the proposal for a Caribbean Programming Fund should be placed urgently before CARICOM Heads for their consideration. The media, she noted, would have to play a pivotal role in reshaping the attitudes and consciousness of Caribbean people.

“What are governments of the region confronted with today? When we sit down to provide our estimates, we have now to be able to provide money for medication for persons suffering from AIDS, we have to provide serious funding for drug addictions, crime and road accidents. And the consequential cost that this has had on the insurance industry and reinsurance and all of these things that are now confronting governments as serious social and economic issues, emanate from personal behaviour patterns of Caribbean citizens, behavioural patterns that flow from the attitude that each of them has that has led them to that predisposition,” Mottley said.

Saint Lucia’s Director of Information Services, Embert Charles, who was one of the island’s representatives at the Barbados seminar, has himself come out in support of the fund’s establishment.

According to Charles, “We see this as long overdue particularly in view of the fact that the CBU is initiating a long term project to use broadcasting as a means of furthering the regional integration movement in the Caribbean.”  Representatives of the Government Information Service have been holding a series of meetings with a number of producers in the region with the hope of beginning an exchange-of-material programme across the Caribbean for television. Charles says the exchange programme would serve to supplement the work that CBU has been doing in the Caribbean.

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