Barbados PM Mottley Calls for Cooperation to Spur Development

During an official visit to China that began over the weekend, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley said that all nations should put their differences aside to work together to tackle common global challenges and spur development for the people.

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"In spite of differences and size, the commitment to a number of key values allows us to be able to work cooperatively together," Mottley pointed out, stressing the importance of Barbados-China ties.

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which marks its 10th anniversary in 2023, is a global development plan that "is able to help countries across the world bring greater levels of development and greater levels of connectivity in working and helping each other," she noted.

"Barbados is happy to have signed that agreement," said Mottley, whose country has already benefited from stepped-up cooperation with China, with repairs made to a number of roads in the Scotland district, representing one-seventh of Barbados' land area.

People-to-people exchanges have led to fruitful cooperation between China and Barbados, especially in the fields of health and education, she said.

Chinese teachers at the Confucius Institute at Barbados' University of the West Indies "are not only teaching Mandarin, but also the culture and the history of China. There were a number of Chinese doctors ... working here and providing critical services to our population."

China's vision of building a community with a shared future for mankind resonates strongly given the current state of international relations, Mottley noted.

"The world is in a very precarious position. And the one thing I know is that we are bound by being human and by living on the same planet... So we start from that perspective," said the Barbadian leader, calling on nations to learn how to live together.

"So we have the climate crisis; we have the pandemic; we have food and water and security issues. And there are too many regions in the world where people just simply do not have access to the appropriate food or safe drinking water," Mottley said, adding the solution is to "work together to make the world a better place."

Although "Barbados may have a small land area. We are a large ocean state at the very time when oceans will be the next frontier that has to help save the planet," she said.