Suzanne Shep­pard

With the death of Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent Hugo Chavez 17 Caribbean coun­tries face a height­ened pe­ri­od of eco­nom­ic un­cer­tain­ty, Sir Ronald Sanders, a busi­ness ex­ec­u­tive and for­mer Caribbean diplo­mat, said in an opin­ion piece pub­lished yes­ter­day.

He said these coun­tries have be­come high­ly re­liant on their oil sup­plies from Venezuela via Petro­Caribe, a part pay­ment-part loan scheme."Of the $14 bil­lion worth of oil that Venezuela pro­vid­ed un­der Petro­Caribe to the 17 de­pen­dent coun­tries up to last year, $5.8 bil­lion con­sti­tut­ed long-term fi­nanc­ing. Cu­ba is the prin­ci­pal ben­e­fi­cia­ry but, in per capi­ta terms, so too are a num­ber of Cari­com coun­tries–Ja­maica par­tic­u­lar­ly," he wrote.

Sir Ronald said the Al­ba Caribe Fund (ACF) and Al­ba Food Fund (AFF)–both fi­nanced al­most en­tire­ly by Venezuela–are al­so sig­nif­i­cant con­trib­u­tors to the wel­fare of the ben­e­fi­cia­ry states. In six years up to 2012, the ACF had in­vest­ed $178.8 mil­lion on 88 projects rang­ing from ed­u­ca­tion to wa­ter. In nine coun­tries, the AFF had in­vest­ed in 12 projects worth $24 mil­lion.He said all were projects of Chavez per­son­al­ly and while car­ried his gov­ern­ment along, the ideas and their ex­e­cu­tion were en­tire­ly of his mak­ing.

"There are many the­o­ries about Chavez's mo­ti­va­tion. One is that he wished to ex­er­cise con­trol over re­liant Caribbean coun­tries in his pas­sion to con­test the in­flu­ence of the US gov­ern­ment and US com­pa­nies in Latin Amer­i­ca," he said."An­oth­er is that he was gen­uine­ly con­cerned about the plight of the poor in all these coun­tries and want­ed to al­le­vi­ate their suf­fer­ing. It was very prob­a­bly a mix­ture of both."

Sir Ronald said apart from Bar­ba­dos and T&T, which did not join Petro Caribe or Al­ba, oth­er Caribbean gov­ern­ments "must all now be very ner­vous" about whether the Petro Caribe and Al­ba arrange­ments, on which they are re­liant will con­tin­ue un­der a new Venezue­lan Pres­i­dent.He said if Chavez's cho­sen suc­ces­sor, Nico­las Maduro, wins the Pres­i­den­tial elec­tion, the arrange­ments may con­tin­ue for a while longer but prob­a­bly un­der amend­ed arrange­ments. How­ev­er, if the elec­tion is won by the op­po­si­tion can­di­date, Hen­rique Capriles, Petro­Caribe and Al­ba will "un­wind fair­ly rapid­ly".

"Capriles, who lost last year's Pres­i­den­tial con­test against Chavez by a ten-point mar­gin, has al­ready in­di­cat­ed that the two schemes would end and the mon­ey fo­cussed in­stead on the needs of the Venezue­lan peo­ple," Sir Ronald said.He called for Cari­com ef­fort, in which T&T and Bar­ba­dos must be in­clud­ed, to come up with mu­tu­al­ly ben­e­fi­cial arrange­ments with Venezuela and oth­er oil and gas pro­duc­ers in all the Amer­i­c­as, as well as in­vest­ment in re­new­able en­er­gy sources such as so­lar, wind, and hy­dro and geo-ther­mal pow­er.

Petro­Caribe, which was es­tab­lished in 2005, ben­e­fits An­tigua, The Ba­hamas, Be­lize, Cu­ba, Do­mini­ca, Grena­da, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti, Hon­duras, Ja­maica, Nicaragua, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, St Kitts, St Vin­cent, St Lu­cia, and Suri­name.