The most brilliant and powerful speech at the 2022 Summit of the Americas

Today when I woke up I came across a message received from a mentor and friend during the night. The message contained a video extracted from the second plenary session with one of the speeches of the Heads of State during the 9th Summit of the Americas that took place in Los Angeles this week between 8-10 June 2022. The session was chaired by the U.S Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

I confess that this year I had little interest in the summit because being a mother, wife, educator, businesswoman, board member, mentor, friend, and investor among so many hats, I have had little time to dedicate 10 hours of my day watching the ebb and flow of protocol, fake diplomacy, empty promises and illusory solutions.

If it hadn't been for the message received at dawn, maybe I would have missed the brilliant and historic speech that usually doesn't interest the televised media, let alone reverberates massively on social media. I felt obliged to share my feelings here.

Illuminated by the lyrics of Bob Marley's immortal work "So much trouble in the world", the Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley, the only black woman head of state in the Americas, gave an remarkable speech that all of us should listen to. Focused entirely on solutions to the problems we face in the Americas and in the world, she spoke about the responsibility of developed countries for the double jeopardy of countries in the Americas. Double because the first penalty was when they financed the industrial revolution at the expense of the blood of our black and indigenous ancestors. And the second, because today the same countries make it impossible for us to respond to the most basic human needs and to face the various crises caused by the "developed" world as a consequence of the industrial revolution itself.

She also used a snippet of Bob Marley's somewhat prophetic song written in 1979 but which would allude to the current space race of billionaires Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Richard Branson driven more by egos than genuine concern for those most affected by the three crises we face: climate, pandemic, commodities: food, fuel and fertilizer.

She also criticized international financial institutions for their lack of funding for post-crisis reconstruction, spoke about the difficult task of funding climate change adaptation, and made several concrete proposals. I list below a summary complementing with some additional data.

Nine solutions proposed by the Prime Minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley:

1. Reform international financial institutions (eg IDB, World Bank) to increase financing for post-crisis adaptation and reconstruction.

2. Create a financing platform for middle-income countries, which concentrate 75% of the poor, but which are receiving disproportionately low financing because they are middle-income.

3. Redirect money to the most vulnerable to climate change, given that only 15% of climate change funding goes to the most vulnerable

4. Reform the Summit of the Americas event itself so that leaders stop talking at each other and start talking to one another

5. Support the International Organization for Migration (IOM) so that we start treating immigrants with dignity, as they do not leave their countries and loved ones because they want to, but because they have no other option

6. Reform the Organization of American States (OAS) so that it stops playing a merely political role and starts creating opportunities for all people in the Americas, such as supporting young people under 18 to become bilingual and trilingual, unleashing unimaginable economic possibilities in the next decade

7. Make access to clean energy a basic right for every citizen, as for example what she did in Barbados through law and provision of solar panels on the roofs of households for free

8. Use the 2030 Compact and the Americas Partnership Platform to create a joint procurement platform for critical supplies for the Americas to reduce the price and ensure access to critical goods such as vaccines, as was done with Africa's Medical Supplies Platform

9. Stop the Caribbean financial exclusion due to the high costs of compliance with stricter US regulations and the perception that the region is a high-risk jurisdiction, the phenomenon known as de-risking that has led countries like Belize to see a reduction in 56% in transaction volume since 2011.

PM Mia Mottley was brilliant, conciliatory, pragmatic and poetic in her statements. She concluded with a strong critique of the US Government's decision not to allow Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela to participate in the 2022 Summit and re-centered the conversation on people rather than ideologies.

Antony Blinken, who so far had not made any comments after other speeches, could not contain himself and quoted some Bob songs such as "No woman no cry" and "Redemption song" expressing a certain unusual excitement with the PM's speech and the works of the king of Reggae.

And it was well deserved. Mia Mottley was named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Most Influential People for 2022. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Director General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) described her in the magazine as "bold, fearless and possessing great intellect and intelligence."

Mia Mottley has taken us where we need to go and twisted our necks in the direction we should be looking at as Americas and as world.

Thank you, extraordinary Mia Mottley.

I leave an excerpt from the speech by PM Mia Mottley that impacted me very much.

Speech excerpt

"My friends,

How much more evidence do we need??

We see men sailing on their ego trip blast off on their spaceship million miles from reality no care for you no care for me [Lyrics by Bob Marley in "So much Trouble in the World"]

If I could have sang it you would have joined me [jokes Mia Mottley]

But I don't need you to join me in the words of this song

I need you to join us in the chorus/course of action of that our people need not want

Our people need immediate intervention

6 weeks crops and 12 weeks crops is what is going to feed our people

We need to be able to shield them from the price of fertilizer that is making their efforts almost impossible?

We need equally to recognize that the debt crisis is already among many developing countries

We simply do not have the fiscal space to respond to crises not spawned by ourselves but spawned by others?

And we are facing a double jeopardy

Our countries were those from whom wealth was extracted in order to build the developed world

Our countries were left at independence with no compact, no money to finance basic rights of housing,?health care and education

And when we fought to do it now we find ourselves having those efforts crowded out literally by our inability to be able to face and find the money because we are using it to recover from a climate crises not of our own making"

Video with the full speech on my YouTube channel.

Transcript of full speech on Government of Barbados website

Bob Marley song written in 1979

So much trouble in the world

So much trouble in the world

Bless my eyes this morning

Jah sun is on the rise once again

The way earthly thin's are goin'

Anything can happen

You see men sailing on their ego trip

Blast off on their spaceship

Million miles from reality

No care for you, no care for me

So much trouble in the world

So much trouble in the world

All you got to do is give a little (give a little)

Give a little (give a little), give a little (give a little)

One more time, ye-ah! (give a little) Ye-ah! (give a little)

Ye-ah! (give a little) Yeah!

So you think you've found the solution

But it's just another illusion

So before you check out this tide

Don't leave another cornerstone

Standing there behind

We've got to face the day

Ooh-wee, come what may

We the street people talkin'

Yeah, we the people strugglin'

Now they sitting on a time bomb (Bomb-bomb-bomb! Bomb-bomb-bomb!)

Now I know the time has come (Bomb-bomb-bomb! Bomb-bomb-bomb!)

What goes on up is coming on down (Bomb-bomb-bomb! Bomb-bomb-bomb!)

Goes around and comes around (Bomb-bomb-bomb! Bomb-bomb-bomb!)

So much trouble in the world

So much trouble in the world

So much trouble in the world

There is so much trouble (So much trouble in the world)

There is so much trouble

There is so much trouble (So much in the world)

There is so much trouble

There is so much trouble in the world (So much trouble in the world)

There is (So much in the world)

(So much trouble in the world)