Mr. Secretary-General, Your Majesty, Honourable Prime Ministers and Ministers of Finance, Distinguished Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen:
In welcoming you this evening, may I express my very real pleasure at the fact that it has been possible, during your short visit to this country, to introduce you to at least one or two of the twelve hundred islands which, together, constitute the Republic of Maldives.
Many of the tourists who visit these shores engage in what has become known here as “island hopping” often travelling to several islands and, in so doing, sampling their individual delights and storehouse of marine treasures.
I am given to understand that, in the early years of group-package tours of continental Europe, so many countries were visited with such speed seven countries in ten days was not uncommon - that the only sure way some individuals on such tours knew where they were was to consult their itineraries! Thus was born the infamous ”If it’s Tuesday it must be Luxembourg”. It is a fascinating thought that even if such an experience were possible here in the Maldives, and three islands were visited each and every day, people would still not have completed their ‘tour’ of this “small island Republic” in one whole year!
But this evening we are on Bandos, one of the earlier islands in the Maldives to be developed for the purpose of tourism, and I do hope that you will like what you see and, in the process, enjoy the occasion. We are, as ever, delighted and honoured to have you with us. Indeed, it is our wish that your brief time in these islands will prove to be as constructive as it will be pleasant. Our efforts have most certainly been toward such ends.
While, as I remarked this morning, the Maldives is relatively new to the Commonwealth, we have been greatly impressed by the informal and relaxed nature of its gatherings but which never lack either purpose or conviction. I trust that our meeting here in the Maldives will be no exception to that excellent rule.
Indeed, what better medium to sound a clarion call for the economic and trade reforms which the international community can no longer deny, but an organization containing within it virtually every race and religion, a lexicon of economic systems and varying styles of government, and which represents some 1,000 million souls, who live in every continent and who spangle the seas and oceans in between.
While we may vary so, our greatest inherent strengths are our resilience, vitality and, born of such diversity as I have just described, our built-in ability to make a positive and durable contribution in overcoming the many challenges posed to the human condition in so many lands. This task, I am sure, we will address ourselves to in good measure during the course of this meeting. But if the Commonwealth is to continue to have a relevance, and if it is to avoid suffering the fate accorded to both institutions and individuals who refuse wilfully, selfishly, or through fear, to face the future as it is surely going to be, we have to pursue those strengths and utilise those assets to which I have made reference.
For we have, collectively, sat and talked at length on many occasions on the need for economic and trade reforms. We have spoken eloquently on the remedies required. And as the years have passed, the conviction of the opinions being expressed have not diminished, nor the enthusiasm with which the greater majority of us have been advised that the patient was on the point of recovery. But unfortunately that has not materialised. Indeed, the patient has shown little sign of improvement and, more often than not, has shown signs of a progressive decline!
While there have been some encouraging signs of world economic recovery, it has been fragile, volatile and, in the greater majority of primary producing states, barely perceptible. And if I may carry the medical analogy a little further, even in those cases where a recovery is discernible, it is apparent to have had only an effect in certain parts of the patient’s anatomy; the recovery, in short, is, extremely limited.
The meeting which we began today, in addressing itself to the crucial issues before it, does not need to search for whole new panaceas. In fact, we need do no more in formulating economic strategy than pay renewed attention to simple, self-evident factors. Simple, but nonetheless, absolutely crucial.
Consider, for instance, the barriers mounted by industrial society, which so inhibit the ability of the developing countries to sell their produce. I take the example of cane sugar, which the Maldives patently does not produce, so it is an example free of personal interest, but one, I know, which vitally affects many Commonwealth states, who depend upon this particular commodity for their economic well-being.
According to a recent issue of The Economist, the current price of sugar on world markets stands at just below four cents a pound, one third of the cost it takes to produce it, and the EEC pays its farmers five times the market price twenty cents for every pound of beet sugar they produce. The difference between the four cents a pound this sugar sells for and the twenty cents farmers are paid to produce it cost European tax-payers and consumers about two billion dollars during 1984. The cost of the subsidy paid to Europe’s farmers amounted to a loss of 350 dollars on each tonne of sugar sold, to the detriment of so many producers of cane sugar in the Commonwealth and elsewhere, who virtually depend upon it for their livelihood.
A clear example, if I may say so, of a case for re-ordering the EEC’s “rules of origin”. As another example, may I request that we consider, or re-consider, the attitudes and the atmosphere surrounding the question of “aid”. At present it has the connotation, and therefore promotes an image, of charitable donations entailing wide deprivation by the governments and their tax-payers who give it But the fact that most aid is spent in the donor countries themselves, which assists promotion of their own economies, makes even aid in the form of grants every bit as much an expansion of industrial economies as it does an expression of charity. We need to pay a greater acknowledgement to the direct relationship between the welfare of the man in the cane fields, or in a country’s fishing grounds in the South, and the man on the car or tractor assembly line in the industrial plants of the North.
For it is an irrefutable fact that people in the industrialized nations continue to lose their jobs as a direct result of the decline of the purchasing power among the people of the third world. If, during the past two decades, developing countries had been able to maintain their rates of economic growth, many of the millions of unemployed in the Western world would have certainly been employed in the exports sectors of their respective countries.
These and such other evident anomalies deserve to be tackled with greater resolve and imagination. I have spoken of evident truths. I hope we will have the courage to acknowledge that humanity is indeed on the march, spiritually and intellectually. An essential part of such human awakening is a worldwide recognition that the welfare of humanity is interdependent; that the standard of living enjoyed in the industrialized nations is directly related to the nature of welfare being experienced by people in the developing world, and that one of the surest means of raising both is the free exchange of goods across the face of the earth.
We have the opportunity, as perhaps never before, even out of crisis, to create a new society in which humanity can advance and flourish in the spirit and air of mutuality, buttressed by independence and freedom, and based in turn on shared assumptions, shared destinations, and above all, on equality of opportunity.
This is the Commonwealth’s finest role.
Let us be equal to it