Keynote Address

• His Worship the Mayor Desmond McKenzie, Kingston & St. Andrews, Jamaica

Mayor of Atlanta, the Hon. Shirley Franklin, The Executive Director of CIFAL Atlanta, members of the board, participants in the workshop, guests, ladies and gentlemen.

His Worship the Mayor Sesmond McKenzie with Axel Leblois and Alex Mejia.

The United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) has been playing a significant role in helping these cities to meet the challenges of the globalised era, through its 12 CIFAL centres around the world which have been providing training for local authorities and mayors. We in Jamaica are very appreciative of these efforts.

Today, we are dealing with the topic of "Free Trade: Opportunities and Threats for Local Communities in the Caribbean."

As a developing Nation, we too have concerns about the actions and outcomes being promoted by international organizations, multinational corportations and individual governments.

We are concerned about the dangers of free trade and globalization, the exploitation of workers, the destruction of the environment and growing inquality of incomes around the world. We know that the most common complaint about globalization has been that it is unfair. Many people believe that it is unfair in a number of areas including trade, the environmental, the profits of multinationals as well as the actions of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

Since the arguments both for and against globalization primarily deal with fairness, it has become the most crucial issue in the current discussions on the issue.

The questions is how do we reconciliate, when both sides have such diametrically opposite positions.

Habitat in 2001 reported that most discussions on globalization mainly dealt with macroeconomic development and human development, while the development of human settleements received very little attention. And we agree with the report that this is an unfortunate situation, because the results of economic and human development are strongly linked to the conditions and processes of human settlements.

The Habitat report looked at human settlement trends, as an issue of globalization, and recognised that there was an uneven distribution of the benefits and costs of globalization.

In many countries, real incomes have fallen and the number of poor households are increasing, particularly in the urban areas, and this inequality means that the impact of growth on fighting poverty is getting weaker.

Therefore, the challenge that we face is to be able to share the benefits of globalization equally, so that it can have as much of an impact on reducing poverty as on increasing growth.

This is the major challenge for all nations as we move into this era.

How we handle it will explain whether or not those who protested against globalization in Seattle in December 1999, or in Paraguay in 2000, or in Italy in 2001 as well as those who attempted to stop the world economic forum meeting in Melbourne were correct when they warned about the dangers of free trade and globalization to workers, the environment and the poor peoples of this world in general.

We, in Kingston, are concerned about the threat of competition between cities, and the fragmentation within cities, which have also been predicted.

Fragmentation reduces the capacity of our cities to build coalitions, mobilize resources and develop adequate governance structures.

In some cities, the local authority, in an effort to appeal to global investors, has had to shift from its traditional managerial approach to that of a commercial business that treats the city as a product to be marketed.

This approach leads to the dominance of business interests over the people and a reduction of the social role of the local authority in urban planning.

In this context, we agree with Habitats suggestion that our challenge is to develop strategies that are not totally influenced by the economic functioning of the markets, but which include support for the excersize of citizenship and, here I add, the growing social needs of urban communities.

We need to develop broad-based cooperation between the private sector and civil society.

We also need to strengthen the capacity of local governments and low-income communities to participate, as equal partners, in human settlements development.

In doing so, we need to empower the poorest of our cities to play a key role in these developments.

Jamaica has fully supported the system of liberalised trading all along. We have actively participated in every multilateral round of negotiations since joining GATT in 1963 and its successor, The WTO, since 1994.

However, in meeting the challenges of modernization and free competition, we recognize that our small producers with marginal land spaces, limited access to education and technology, are at a considerable disadvantage.

Indeed our small farmers fall in this category, and threaten us with a serious decline in agricultural production, which has already began to show up in reduced opportunities for rural employment,

The result of this is the threat of increased rural-urban drift to our two main cities, Kingston and Montego Bay, and some of the worst examples of urban decline, including crime and violence.

In the rural parts of the municipality of Kingston and St. Andrew, hundreds of small coffee farmers, who have relied on the distiguished Blue Mountain nameto make a living from the export of the product, are suffering serious decline in their production for various reasons including poor roads, flooding, natural disasters and other environmentally related problems which our council is unable to address because of our limited resources.

At the moment, the members of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) are working towards the creation of an intra-regional signle market,, the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), which should allow for goods, services, people and capital to move around the region without restrictions and tariffs by providing for a common economic trading policy.

The arrangement, hopefully, will further harmonise economic, monetary and fiscal policies in the region and allow for sustainable development.

It is the wish of the regional governments to create more opportunities for employment, investment, trade and production for the people of the community.

However, we must be concerned that with the CSME in place, the manufacturing sector in Kingston will face increasing competition from regional cities.

Our manufacturing sector has served us well over the years, but our city has not been able to keep apace with developments in other areas of the country, as well as the region, and with its overburdened resources we will now be forced to look to areas other than manufacturing to generate investments and employment.

Currently, there are no overall plans for guiding the growth and development of the city.

This has led to a situation where there are forces simply following the development pattern of recent years and, often, competing against eachother.

For example, in one section of the municipality housing projects are developed which have led to a reduction of the cities population, but on the other hand there are projects which seek to redevelop the city in direct contrast to those plans.

Our council has sought to develop a sustainable development plan which should provide an overall strategy for a 20-year growth period.

We have reviewed the factors which have influenced growth and development in the municipality.

We have outlined alternative growth scenerios, and it has been recommended that future regional growth should promote sustainable economic development of the municipality, by preventing further urban sprawl and the negative effects of continued depopulation of the city.

We have outlined in detail the problems of growth and development in the municipality and the challenges that must be addressed over a 20-year period.

We have looked at strategic directions and actions that are needed to achieve our goals and we are also discussing local government reform.

Our main problem is that most pof our local authorities still depend on the central government for financial support. When there is a cut in these grants, as we are currently facing in Kingston, our ability to deliver services much less plan for the future are severely limited.

In this context, I am urging the international lending agencies to look again at their loan policies and see, whether of not, they cannot introduce lending programmes which allow them toi make loans directly to the local authorities to assist them to meet the needs of their populations.

However, we urge them that if they consider this possibility of dealing directly with us, they offer us on terms which are affordable to local authorities.

Ladies and gentlemen, we in the city of Kingston are not unaware of the complexities of free trade and serious challenges that it will create.

We are determined to remain a viable and essential part of that development, in light of our location and our resources.

But, like other cities of the region, we face serious obstacles in our efforts. So we welcome opportunities like these, whcih give us the chance to discuss and compare the positives and negatives, in the hope that we may be of help to eachother in overcoming the difficulties we commonly face as a region and, ultimately, as a planet.

Thank You ladies and Gentlemen.