Balancing the World Economy: An Interview with Ambassador Byron Blake, Deputy United Nations Permanent Representative for Antigua and Barbuda

Antigua and Barbuda is currently the Chair of the Group of 77 and China. This interview was conducted on May 19, 2008, in a United Nations hall where a meeting on Financing for Development had just concluded. One follow up question was asked and answered by email in July.

COLLINS: One of the things that I believe the G77 has accomplished over the last couple of decades is to increase South-South trade. Am I right in believing that?

BLAKE: The grouping has focused, among other things, on two broad sets of relationships. One is the economic relationship, including trade with the developed countries. The second is the relationship within itself, within the South. In the last decade or so, the grouping has been putting greater and greater emphasis on the South-South component even as it seeks to ensure that international economic and trade policies are supportive. So if you were to look at the summit which was held in Cuba—Havana—in 2000, and also the summit which was held in Doha in 2005, you would observe that the conclusions of those two summits placed significant emphasis on increasing South-South economic relations and economic transactions, including trade. The statistics indicate a significant increase in trade among countries of the South. But it is not easy to determine exactly how much of that result is due to that policy. Still, we have been seeing that South-South trade has been growing significantly faster than both North-South trade and overall global trade. So the emphasis is there. And you are beginning to see a number of co-operative arrangements being established in the South.

Outside of the area of trade, you are seeing investment and other cooperative activities increasing in the South. Now, I’m not saying that the group as such can take all the credit for that because there are more resources in the South [now than at any other time], and its countries would by themselves, even without formal arrangements, see the benefits. But you are finding greater cooperation, coordination and cohesion in the group.

COLLINS: So the group has been a catalyst. It’s not the cause, but maybe it’s a catalyst—

BLAKE: Yes, it’s a catalyst and it has been discussing greater South-South cooperation as one of its strategic planks forward. Those discussions are beginning to translate into actual economic and trade outcomes.

COLLINS: When you say strategic does that mean that the group—gives the South more weight in negotiations with developed countries? Is it strategic in that sense, in the sense that it gives them greater power and greater leverage?

BLAKE: Well, it is strategic both because the South is now saying—look: in terms of pushing our development, we will not just depend on what we do with the North. We will also push what we do among ourselves. We will not allow our relations to be incidental. We will make them central to our strategy for development. While this might not have been a conscious expectation, increasing the level of transactions within itself does give the group both greater confidence and greater leverage in terms of negotiations with the North.

COLLINS: Just to follow up on that a little bit, the last statement [during the just-concluded meeting on Financing for Development] was read by the Jamaican representative. He was talking about The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and about how the Caribbean or some of the other countries are moving towards a common market, and this is obviously an example of South-South cooperation. But it’s something that would impact, for instance, Antigua and Barbuda more directly than an agreement across the entire G77. I was just wondering, how fast is that progressing, this movement toward integration in the Caribbean?

BLAKE: Well, the English-speaking Caribbean countries have been in the process of increasing their economic integration in a structured way since 1968. In 1968, they established a free-trade area, the Caribbean Free Trade Area (CARIFTA) among eleven independent and...