CASTRIES (St Lucia), March 27 (BERNAMA-NNN-AGENCIES) — Commonwealth small island developing states began a two-day meeting here with St Lucia’s Prime Minister Dr Kenny Anthony underscoring the importance of developing strategies to deal with many challenges confronting them, including debt restructuring and climate change.

Addressing the third Global Biennial Conference on Small States, Anthony urged his Commonwealth counterparts to fully examine the words, resilience, reliability, responsiveness and redundancy which he said were crucial in helping the countries weather the current global environment.

The conference is being held under the theme “Building Resilience in Small States” and will focus on debt challenges, governance structures, environment resource management and climate change issues, with a view to developing concrete and practical solutions to the vulnerability, and problems of small states.

Prime Minister Anthony said reliability is one virtue generally considered by all.

“We want robust economies, social and legal systems that work all the time in a timely manner. This encourages business and investment.

“Responsiveness too is critical to good governance both the state and the productive sectors need to be responsive to economic variations that are inevitable.

“Redundancy is however the other critical ingredient. While it is generally thought of in the negative sense, in common parlance from an engineering prospective, redundancy refers to the need for a system to prevail even when the primary ones fail. Sometimes you want duplication, you need alternatives, you need back-ups and reserves to be resilient,” he told the delegates.

Anthony maintained that this focus was paramount given the emphasis being placed on small developing states this year.

Commonwealth Secretary General Kamalesh Sharma said the resilience of developing countries will be examined over the next two days as the Commonwealth Secretariat seeks ways to help small island developing states deal with the myriad of challenges they face.

The third Global Biennial Conference on Small States gives representatives of government, academia and international organizations a chance to discuss key concerns of small states, share practical lessons and review policy options, he said.

“Small states tend to get marginalized in international discourse,” he said.

“We are trying to be very practical in this, if you disaggregate all the problems that are contributing to the vulnerability of the states, then you have very specific assignments which you can give yourself,” Sharma said.

“We are very strong in the Commonwealth in developing the idea of vulnerability and what it consists of. It’s more than poverty, middle-income states can also be very vulnerable states because of the effect which the global context is having on them,” he said.

The two-day conference will focus on five pillars of resilience: macro-economic stability; micro-economic market efficiency; good governance; social development and cohesion; and sound environmental management.

The United Nations has designated 2014 as the International Year of Small Island Developing States.

Seychelles Foreign Minister Jean-Paul Adam said that he is hoping “to see real recognition from the Commonwealth, which needs to be taken to all other international financial institutions, of the key specificity of the islands.”

“We cannot have a one-size-fit-all, we have to have an approach which looks at the realities of these countries,” he said.

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