How CARICOM is responding to the damage caused by Hurricane Beryl

by: David Commissiong, Barbados’ Ambassador to CARICOM

The forty-seventh Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) that was held in St. George’s, Grenada between the 28th and the 30th of July 2024, could really be dubbed the “Hurricane Beryl Conference”.

And I say so because the agenda of the Conference was thoroughly dominated by discussions about the damage caused to some eight CARICOM Member States or Associate Member States by Hurricane Beryl, and also by plans and decisions as to how CARICOM will be attempting to repair the damage and to address the overarching issue of the Climate Crisis in a coordinated and systematic manner.

The Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency (CDEMA) gave a
report on the devastating damage wrought by Hurricane Beryl to the region, but indicated that it was not yet in a position to put a dollar figure to the overall quantity of the damage or to the size of the required repair bill. However, President Mohammed Irfaan-Ali of Guyana – the Head of Government with lead responsibility for regional agricultural development – was able to report that the initial estimate of the damage done to CARICOM’s land-based agricultural sector is in the region of US $160 million.

In addition, Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley reported on the damage done to CARICOM’S fisheries sector. She noted that Barbados’ fishing industry had sustained extremely significant and heart rending damage, and indicated that Barbados was still in the process of calculating the repair bill. The unanimous opinion of the Conference was that the phenomenon of “global warming” is at the heart of these increasingly violent hurricanes that are periodically causing so much damage to the Caribbean Community, and that the current scenario in which the wealthy developed countries that are responsible for “global warming” are providing little or no resources to assist Caribbean nations to rebuild and repair is fundamentally unjust and unacceptable.

It is against this background therefore, that the CARICOM Heads of Government agreed to the following multifaceted response to the damage caused by Hurricane Beryl:

(1) The establishment of a Prime-Ministerial sub-committee, chaired by
Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley, and mandated to develop a strategy for securing finances to be applied towards the Hurricane Beryl repair and rebuilding operations.

(2) The staging of a donor’s conference on the margins of the 29th edition of the Conference of the Parties – COP29 – which is scheduled to be held in Azerbaijan in November of this year.

(3) Agreement that all CARICOM Member States will deliver a single unified Statement at COP 29 decrying the injustice of CARICOM nations having to consistently foot repair and rebuilding bills for a destructive climate phenomenon that they are not responsible for, and insisting that immediate concrete steps must be taken to fully fund and operationalize a “Loss and Damage” mechanism.

(4) The staging of an urgent meeting between CARICOM’s Finance Ministers and the Management of the Caribbean Catastrophe Risk Insurance
Facility (CCRIF), in order to express the CARICOM Governments’ dissatisfaction with the failure of CCRIF’s so called “parametric” insurance policies to register and provide compensation for much of the Hurricane Beryl damage, and to discuss how these policies could be redesigned in order to make them more useful to and supportive of
CARICOM Member States.

(5) An expression of approval of and support for a package of short, medium, and long term strategies towards recovery from Hurricane Beryl to be spearheaded by regional institutions.

(6) The urging of regional financial institutions to provide a special
programme of support to the agriculture stakeholders and enterprises towards recovery and rehabilitation.

It should also be recorded that time and time again at the Conference it was stressed that the most substantial and effective responses that had been made to the Hurricane Beryl devastation had come from fellow CARICOM Member States, thereby emphasizing the enduring relevance and importance of CARICOM as a mechanism for regional integration and for collective assistance and security.

Indeed, Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell of Grenada was fulsome in his expression of appreciation for the contributions that a contingent of the Guyana Defence Force is currently making to physical reconstruction efforts in the devastated island of Carriacou, while Prime Ministers Gonsalves, Mottley and Pierre all expressed similar appreciation for a variety of other expressions of solidarity and assistance by fellow CARICOM Member States.