(CARICOM Secretariat, Georgetown, Guyana) The immediate past Chair of CARICOM’s Council for Foreign and Community Relations (COFCOR), The Hon. Billie A. Miller says the current discussion on the reform of the United Nations (UN) Security Council represents an opportunity CARICOM states as small vulnerable actors in the international system, to “inform a new definition of security with the realities and threats that we experience on a daily basis which make our lives and our countries insecure.”

Addressing CARICOM Foreign Ministers at their annual meeting in The Bahamas on Tuesday June 1, Minister Miller said she was pleased that a study had been commissioned on new aspects of a foreign and security policy for CARICOM.

She noted that the predominant focus on the militaristic, conflict-based aspects of security marginalised other dimensions of security which were equally or even more important for assuring its achievement.

The Barbados Foreign Minister pointed out that “as developing countries we are all too aware of the multidimensional nature of security but are faced with the challenge of changing the terms of the international debate on this subject. The more powerful voices of the developed nations have placed terrorism and other forms of violent trans-national crime, the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and war at the top of the list of destabilising elements that make the world insecure.”

“Yet” Minister Miller pointed out, “ it is the developing world that represents the more populous grouping of the international community and therefore the prevailing notion of security is less than “half the story” an incomplete picture of what defines our vulnerability everyday. Those of us who are also Ministers of Trade know that security has become the most recent non-tariff barrier to trade. So it goes beyond the military aspect,” she declared.

She observed that the Caribbean, having the highest per capita incidence of HIV/AIDS after sub-Saharan Africa and being a Region susceptible to increasingly worse natural disasters each year, has a peculiar sensitivity to non-military elements of security.

“As we have all recognised, the current debate represents a golden opportunity for CARICOM to sensitise the international community on the concept of multidimensional nature of security. At our COFCOR meeting last year we agreed to consider global security not only in terms of an interpretation which gives salience to terrorism but also from the perspective of vulnerabilities of small states,” Minister Miller said.