And turning now to the week ahead, San Pedro will welcome the Caricom's heads of Government for the 33rd Inter-sessional meeting.
It's a meeting that's integrally important to the security and progress of the region and it's no wonder because the agenda for the two-day meeting is jam-packed.
We got just a preview of those talking points from Belize's Minister of Foreign Affairs Eamon Courtney when he sat down with our Sunup hosts on Wednesday. Here's how he laid it out.
Eamon Courtenay, Minister of Foreign Affairs
"For example, the head will be looking at the Post COP26 climate change as it affects the Caribbean. COP27 will be in Egypt later this year and so we are starting to do an analysis of the failures of COP26 and how we position the region for COP27. We have the whole question of COVID, the continued reality of lack of access to vaccines around the region, the state of the preparedness in the region to deal with the consequences, the economic consequences, the health consequences and to put on the international agenda the position of CARICOM in so far as the Covid, not only the actor dealing with the pandemic but also the recovery in addition to which there is the question of Haiti. As you know Haiti is a member of CARICOM, unfortunately, Haiti is suffering from a serious crisis of governance. The current, first of all there is no president, the current Prime Minister, his term in inverted commas came to an end on the 6th of February and so the question is what is the legitimacy of his current governing and Caribbean community feels very strongly that Haiti is our member and we need to engage the international community to find a Haitian designed solution to the governance problems and just as urgently to the whole question of the effects of earthquakes, the effects of hurricanes because there is tremendous suffering in Haiti as well as Covid. So, those are three very important issues that we will be dealing with, we will be dealing with other issues, for example, the Caribbean single market and the economy, the implementation of it, where we are with it, Prime Minister Mia Mottley who chairs the Prime Ministerial sub-committee has written to each head of government identifying in each country, what they have achieved and what they need to do, what they have failed to do and she is pushing very aggressively for implementation of the measures that we should do so that we can have free movement of people goods and services throughout the region."
