T&T and small Caribbean is­lands are like “ham­sters on a wheel” be­cause of the ups and downs of try­ing to de­vel­op says Plan­ning and De­vel­op­ment Min­is­ter Camille Robin­son-Reg­is.

Ac­cord­ing to a re­lease from the Min­istry of Plan­ning, Robin­son-Reg­is made the state­ment while speak­ing in San­ti­a­go, Chile at the glob­al 2030 Agen­da at the Third Meet­ing of the Fo­rum of the Coun­tries of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean on Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment. The event took place from April 24 to yes­ter­day.

The re­lease said t T&T had been in­vit­ed to share as best prac­tice the progress made re­gard­ing the glob­al 2030 agen­da.

“Small is­land de­vel­op­ing states, es­pe­cial­ly those in the Caribbean feel like ‘ham­sters on a wheel,’ where­by as soon as we are able to achieve some mod­icum of suc­cess, the more de­vel­oped coun­tries come up with some­thing new to which we must adapt, or we are set back by a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter,” she said.

Robin­son-Reg­is al­so spoke on the im­pact of cli­mate change and oth­er is­sues on economies say­ing “through the metaphor that as soon we are mak­ing head­way in the re­gion we are drowned’ by ‘eco­nom­ic wa­ters’ or the wa­ters of a nat­ur­al dis­as­ter.”

Robin­son-Reg­is al­so touched on T&T’s achieve­ment de­spite the chal­lenges of be­ing a small de­vel­op­ing coun­try.

She said, “This is a pos­i­tive feat for T&T, as our achieve­ments in ar­eas such as cli­mate change, since we are among few coun­tries in the world and first in the Eng­lish speak­ing re­gion to de­vel­op a mon­i­tor­ing, re­port­ing and ver­i­fi­ca­tion sys­tem to mon­i­tor our green­house gas emis­sions as part of our com­mit­ment to the Paris Agree­ment. In ad­di­tion to our cli­mate change suc­cess, 93 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion of 1.4 mil­lion has ac­cess to pipe-borne wa­ter; ap­prox­i­mate­ly 97 per cent of the pop­u­la­tion has been giv­en ac­cess to elec­tric­i­ty and we have at­tained uni­ver­sal ed­u­ca­tion as part of our vi­sion to achieve the Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goals and the 2030 Agen­da through T&T’s Na­tion­al De­vel­op­ment Strat­e­gy, Vi­sion 2030.”

The re­lease said the fo­rum pro­vides T&T with the op­por­tu­ni­ty to share its ex­pe­ri­ences with rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the Caribbean arch­i­pel­ago, Latin Amer­i­ca and the Unit­ed Na­tions Sys­tem, par­tic­u­lar­ly the Eco­nom­ic Com­mis­sion for Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean (ECLAC). 

In ad­di­tion to this op­por­tu­ni­ty to have the coun­try’s voice heard at the fo­rum, T&T is al­so among the ap­proved list of coun­tries pre­sent­ing a Vol­un­tary Na­tion­al Re­port on the im­ple­men­ta­tion of the Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment Goals at the High-Lev­el Po­lit­i­cal Fo­rum on Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment at the Unit­ed Na­tions in 2020.