The government of St. Vincent and the Grenadines is estimating that Hurricane Beryl left EC$800 million in damage when it ravaged the island chain on July 1.
Minister of Finance Camillo Gonsalves noted that the climate change conversation includes loss and damage.
“The damage is what the storm blew down. That’s what was mashed up. The losses are money that would have been made,” he said on Issue at Hand on We FM on Sunday.
He said loss includes the impact that Union Island resident Abdon Whyte had spoken about on the same programme regarding the impact on the hospitality and fisheries sectors because of damage to their assets.
“Those are losses that are in addition to the $800 million that I’m talking about,” Gonsalves said.
“Where I sit now as minister of finance, St. Vincent Grenadines does not today have the $800 million to replace everything that has been damaged. I don’t want anybody — I hear a lot of talk about how much money we have, and money everywhere, and money spending everywhere — $800 million in damage.”
Gonsalves noted that Parliament approved an EC$136 million supplementary budget to address the immediate aftermath of the storm.
“And some of that budget wasn’t dealing with loss, it wasn’t dealing with damage, it was dealing with income support and this kind of thing,” he said.
“So, we have some money from the Saudis, we have some money from the World Bank, but we still have a gap in damages in excess of $200 million, probably in excess of $300 million, and so we don’t have all the money today that we will need to put everything back together, which is why, yes, local consumption, local activity, taxes, the buoyancy of the GDP, is important.”
He said that the country will not get out of the hole that the cyclone created without concessional financing and grants “from the outside world”.
“And so that’s why we have reprogrammed money that we were going to use to build the hospital,” he said, referring to US$80 million loan that was redirected to hurricane relief.
“We’ve shifted the world back money to storm relief, and now we’re getting the construction money for the hospital from Taiwan,” he said, referring to the US$125 million that the government is borrowing from Taipei this year.
All they good for a call out big figures. No plan to fix anything. No plans to create employment. No plans to tackle the crime rate. No plans to bring the economy under control. No plans for anything what so ever. They are full of lies and deception. Vote them out.
Whenever you hear the ULP mob talking, it is about ultra high figures (which is being borrowed in the name of the people), while the people see very little of it. People have to keep stealing and killing to survive. While the ULP promises projects which will be completed in the far off future.
The FM likes to talk about the millions of dollars that they have borrowed everywhere. It looks like he gets a high off of talking about these figures but scores of people are suffering daily and still bawling for a little help while they sit on the borrowed monies, do they think about that when they look at these pictures.