 The Clinton Global Initiative CGI Action Network is focusing on resilience efforts in the Caribbean amid the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Prime Minister Hon. Alan Chastney told the forum that the economic fallout is severe for St. Lucia and the Caribbean, with the main economic driver, the tourism sector, reeling from the crippling effects of global lockdowns, job losses, health system strains. Since the pandemic unfolded, St. Lucia has experienced a 50% decline in tax revenue. That represents a fiscal gap of $600 million for the government. The national debt-to-GDP ratio has climbed to 85%, rolling back the strides government made in reducing the debt-to-GDP below the 60% benchmark to 59%. Prime Minister Chastney says not only is government collecting less revenue, but COVID has added cost to the operation of government. We have no idea what's going to happen next year. So is there going to be a continual reduction of tax revenues, and therefore is there going to be another gap that we have to finance? So the impact has been severe. And on top of that, Mr. President, we have a situation where our expenditures have gone up. So we've had to put in social stabilization programs. We've had to, like Prime Minister Motley, build a new hospital, a respiratory hospital. We've had to run hotels here to allow our nationals to come back home, because sadly voluntary quarantining doesn't work. So therefore we have to have a quarantine. All these have added significant costs to the government. So at one point, your revenues are going down, and the other point, your costs are going up. As the Caribbean adapts to co-existing with COVID-19, the threat of climate change poses new challenges. Prime Minister Chastney is concerned that international financial agencies are yet to change pace on how small island developing states, SIDS, are engaged. OECD still is using per capita GDP to classify access to ODA funds. It still takes in excess of five years to get a project off the ground. There is still not a dedicated fund for small island developing states to access for climate change. And the worst part of all of this is that this debt is accumulating and clearly everybody can see that it's not sustainable and no change has been made. So now with the pandemic, it would be unrealistic on our part to think that there was going to be a global solution. Honourable Chastney believes that there can be no delay in global action to combat COVID-19. An urgent meeting, he says, is needed to discuss the challenges of SIDS in this new normal. You would have thought the crisis of climate change would have gotten everybody to the table. It did not. We see what's taking place with the pandemic right now, which is when everybody's taking care of themselves, very similarly to what happened after the financial crisis when the G7 became the G20. But the rest of the world was left behind. There was no space for us at the table. There's never been a plan to figure out how we were going to solve the problems with the debt that we incurred and nobody cared. Caribbean leaders have joined Prime Minister Chastney in calling on global airlines to implement a pre-testing protocol in order to manage the spread of COVID-19. St. Lucia and the Caribbean, he says, proves that pre-testing is a safeguard. From the Government Information Service, Lisa Joseph reporting.