UNITED NATIONS, United States (CMC) — St Vincent and the Grenadines’ Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves has blamed “old insularities” for the loss of the promise of globalisation.

Addressing the 71st Session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) late Friday, Gonsalves said these “old insularities” were “arid among ancient and aspiring hegemons that seek to plunder the benefit but defer the burdens of our evolving international order”.

Instead, he said what has evolved is a “bastardised version of what was first envisaged: a globalisation that integrates investors but puts working people in disarray and isolates immigrants.

“A system that clamours for commodities but denies the shared responsibilities of a warming planet rising oceans and the destruction wrought by a wronged mother nature,” he said, adding that “a condition thus emerges and consolidates a regime where the contagion of crisis spreads rapidly along globalisation superhighways.”

But Gonsalves said the promise of prosperity is stalled on the “neglected back roads of great power indifference”.

With the shrinking world, the prime minister said “the illusion of intimacy has given way to an epoch of intolerance where the far right, the ultranationalist charlatans and the religious zealots find common cause in exploiting globalisation’s fissures to stoke old fears and prejudices”.

He said the threadbare cliches of globalisation’s assumed benefits are of cold comfort to marginalised nations and peoples, stating that they have “thirsted too long at the dry spigot of promised trickle-down prosperity.

“The long-foretold ‘rising tide that lifts all boats’ has come in the form of rising seas that threaten to inundate Small Island Developing States, and a tsunami of corporate consolidations that have had a deleterious effect on small states, small business, small farmers, and the poor,” Gonsalves said.

In 2016, he said the world must, therefore, confront the chasm between idealistic expectations and deeply flawed realities.

He said modern globalisation, as a concept, as a system of rules and norms, and as an international practice, is “unbalanced and unsustainable.

“It a system that is broken; not beyond repair, but in urgent need of transformation,” the Vincentian prime minister said.

“The benefits accrue to a few; and the burdens of globalisation are too onerous for the many. To use a cricketing metaphor, we must take a ‘fresh guard’.”

Gonsalves said there is an urgent need for a “fresh and transformative approach that adds impetus and immediacy to the theme of the UNGA debate, which calls for a “universal push to transform our world”.

In recognising the potential of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to achieve that transformation, he said existing difficulties are rooted in the inequalities that the SDGs seek to address.

“Our collective quest to achieve those goals is indistinguishable from the overarching pursuit of a fairer, more just, more equal world,” he said.

“We must accept your invitation, Mr President, to reimagine and redesign our global compact, not in the narrow interest of modern-day robber-barons, but with people-centreed programmes and policies.”

 Gonsalves said this government has “aggressively adopted” the SDG Agenda, stating that the country’s focus on economic development and job creation, quality education, poverty eradication, the strengthening of institutions and infrastructure, renewable energy, climate resilience, citizen health and wellness, and security is “central to our national medium-term development plans”.

He disclosed that, this year, St Vincent and the Grenadines has launched a “Zero Hunger Trust Fund,” inspired by Goals One and Two of the SDGs.

Gonsalves said the Zero Hunger Trust Fund employs a “narrowly targeted and multifaceted series of tools designed to ensure that no citizen will go to bed hungry by the year 2020.

“We hope that the Fund will be generously supported by our development partners, and that it will become a best-practice template that can be adopted and adapted in other Small Island contexts.”

Noting that Goal Seven of the SDGs speaks to the development of renewable energy, with particular emphasis on Small Island Developing States (SIDS), Gonsalves said, in its quest for affordable and clean energy, St Vincent and the Grenadines has invested heavily in developing its geothermal resources.

He said that the country anticipates that, by 2019, at least 50 per cent of the island’s national energy needs will be supplied by geothermal energy, and a full 80 per cent of energy will be generated by a mix of renewable resources, including hydro and solar.

He said his island is indebted to the Clinton Global Initiative, the Abu Dhabi Fund for Development, DFID, the Caribbean Development Bank, the International Renewable Energy Agency, among others, for their “invaluable support in this initiative”.

“If a small, resource-challenged nation like St Vincent and the Grenadines can revolutionise its energy mix and radically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels in a few short years, we find it impossible to accept the dilatory- foot-dragging of rich, powerful nations that have a real responsibility to rapidly reduce their emissions footprint,” he said.

Gonsalves said as big-emitters “continue to dither”, more frequent and intense hurricanes wash away large swaths of St Vincent and the Grenadines’ Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in a matter of hours, stating that “the terrible effects of climate change are already upon us”.

He, therefore, said the spotlight on mitigation must now be shared with adaptation, which, he claimed, is a more immediate concern.