Richard?Lord

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley wants De­fence Min­is­ters from the Amer­i­c­as to de­vise new av­enues to im­prove prepa­ra­tion and co­op­er­a­tion to mit­i­gate hard­ships af­ter nat­ur­al dis­as­ters.

Row­ley said that at yes­ter­day's open­ing of the Twelfth Con­fer­ence of De­fence Min­is­ters in the Amer­i­c­as at the Hy­att Re­gency Ho­tel, Port-of-Spain.

The con­fer­ence two-day con­fer­ence is be­ing chaired by Na­tion­al Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Ed­mund Dil­lon.

Row­ley said Caribbean States have, over the past years, ex­pe­ri­enced "sig­nif­i­cant mis­for­tune" from nat­ur­al dis­as­ters, in­clud­ing Hur­ri­cane Eri­ka which swept Do­mini­ca in Au­gust last year and Hur­ri­cane Matthew, which claimed over 800 hun­dreds lives and caused "hav­oc" in Haiti last week.

"That trag­ic event re­quired hu­man­i­tar­i­an emer­gency as­sis­tance from the re­gion and the wider in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty," adding that sim­i­lar events across the globe in the past year have "vis­it­ed the de­vel­oped, the de­vel­op­ing, the land-locked and on the coastal and is­land states," he said.

Row­ley told De­fence Min­is­ters that the "cur­rent sit­u­a­tion re­quires of us new and dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives, a par­a­digm shift."

Row­ley, who has lead re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for se­cu­ri­ty in Cari­com, said it was not enough to say "we have in­vest­ed in the ac­qui­si­tion of mil­i­tary as­sets (or) that we have amassed ar­ma­ments and are at the cut­ting edge of de­fence tech­nol­o­gy."

He said it was al­so "not enough to say that we have strength­ened our armed forces."

Row­ley said bi­en­ni­al meet­ings of the CD­MA were al­so not enough. He in­sist­ed: "The wave of new threats, which threat­en this era, de­mands noth­ing less than our un­di­vid­ed at­ten­tion to the in­sti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion of ro­bust mech­a­nisms for in­for­ma­tion shar­ing, con­tin­u­ous co­op­er­a­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion."

He stressed those re­quire­ments were not need­ed next year or next month but "now".

Theme of the con­fer­ence was "Strength­en­ing De­fence and Se­cu­ri­ty Co­op­er­a­tion in the hemi­sphere in an in­creas­ing­ly volatile glob­al en­vi­ron­ment," and one of the ma­jor ob­jec­tives of the con­fer­ence was to fos­ter mu­tu­al knowl­edge, analy­sis, de­bate and ex­change of ideas and ex­pe­ri­ences on de­fence and se­cu­ri­ty mat­ters.

T&T was the first Cari­com na­tion to host the CD­MA which is made up of 34 mem­ber states from the Caribbean and the Amer­i­c­as. Cu­ba is not a mem­ber of the group­ing as the US em­bar­go on the Caribbean na­tion re­mains in ef­fect.

Row­ley ex­pressed dis­ap­point over Cu­ba's ab­sence from the meet­ing, which seeks to pro­mote co-op­er­a­tion and col­lab­o­ra­tion among mem­ber coun­tries re­gard­less of cer­tain dif­fer­ences.

Dil­lon in his re­marks al­so called for as­sis­tance to be pro­vid­ed to Haiti in the wake of Hur­ri­cane Matthew. He said he was con­fi­dent the meet­ing will "achieve mean­ing­ful out­comes."