The St Lu­cia gov­ern­ment says it ex­pects to ac­crue ma­jor ben­e­fits for the is­land fol­low­ing the de­ci­sion of Cas­tries to join the Venezue­lan oil ini­tia­tive, Petro­Caribe."This will make it pos­si­ble for the coun­try to re­ceive a reg­u­lar sup­ply of pe­tro­le­um prod­ucts from Venezuela un­der the Petro­Caribe arrange­ments that are cur­rent­ly be­ing utilised by sev­er­al oth­er na­tions in the Caribbean," a state­ment is­sued by the Min­istry of Sus­tain­able De­vel­op­ment and En­er­gy.

It said that the de­ci­sion to join Petro­Caribe had been tak­en against a back­ground of ever-es­ca­lat­ing fu­el costs and the ad­verse im­pact this was hav­ing on the econ­o­my, which is to­tal­ly de­pen­dent on im­port­ed pe­tro­le­um prod­ucts.The state­ment said that equal­ly im­por­tant­ly is that the rev­enue de­rived from the Petro­Caribe arrange­ments will be used to in­vest in so­cial de­vel­op­ment pro­grammes and so­cial in­fra­struc­ture in St Lu­cia, as has been done suc­cess­ful­ly in neigh­bour­ing Caribbean coun­tries.

The state­ment said that Petro­Caribe will pro­vide a mea­sure of cer­tain­ty in the sup­ply of pe­tro­le­um prod­ucts to St Lu­cia re­gard­less what hap­pens with the pro­posed sale of the Hess Oil Ter­mi­nal Fa­cil­i­ty by its own­ers, the Hess Cor­po­ra­tion.

The de­ci­sion to join Petro­Caribe had been strong­ly op­posed by the main op­po­si­tion Unit­ed Work­ers Par­ty (UWP) which com­plained about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a fur­ther in­crease in debt, while a lo­cal fi­nan­cial ex­pert cau­tioned against St Lu­cia join­ing the oil al­liance stat­ing that Cara­cas had iso­lat­ed it­self far too much from the world fi­nan­cial mar­kets and glob­al com­mu­ni­ty.

Petro­Caribe pro­vides for sev­er­al Caribbean coun­tries to pur­chase oil from Venezuela on con­di­tions of pref­er­en­tial pay­ment. The al­liance was launched in 2005 and was aimed at strength­en­ing the coun­tries that are mem­bers of the Bo­li­var­i­an Al­liance for the Peo­ples of Our Amer­i­ca.

Cana