 The Assembly will now hear a statement by His Excellency Allen Michael Chestnut, Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Economic Growth, Job Creation, External Affairs and the Public Service of St. Lucia. I have great pleasure in welcoming the Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Economic Growth, Job Creation, External Affairs and the Public Service of St. Lucia, His Excellency Allen Michael Chestnut. I invite him to address the General Assembly. Madam President, allow me to begin by congratulating you on your election to the presidency of the 73rd session of the General Assembly. Your assumption of this important office contributes to our progress in breaking down the barriers of inequality. With you, one of only four women to have held this position in 73 years. As the first woman from our Latin America and Caribbean region to have been elected President of the General Assembly, we are especially proud of your achievement. St. Lucia is a staunch advocate for gender equality, evidenced by the large percentage of solution women who hold senior positions in and out of our government, including four female ministers in my cabinet. Rest assured that you have my delegation's full support in the upcoming session. Madam President, I stand before you today as a leader of a small island developing state, which is also a middle income country. St. Lucia's engagement in the international system is framed by acronyms that represent designations and categorizations that have been globally accepted. The sids are more vulnerable to natural hazards than other countries. This has become accepted. That the resulting damage from natural disasters has a greater overall impact on our economies by virtue of our small size and has also become widely accepted. That sids, which are also middle income countries, face additional challenges because of the assumptions regarding the capabilities of countries carrying that designation has also been acknowledged. We all know these truths. They are, in fact, self-evident. These halls echo with the words of sids and MICs, leaders year after year making plain and clear the challenges we all face. That global policies and programs and strategies remain unfairly unaccommodating to these very real and true challenges. The world acknowledges our acronyms, but little or nothing else changes. St. Lucia remains economically vulnerable to the risking and the loss of correspondent banking relations. Again out of the reach of any access to concessionary finance. Our reputations are unfairly tarnished by tax labels. We continue to struggle under the weight of international frameworks that do not provide an enabling environment for my country to chart an effective sustainable development path or even to be able to take control of our own destiny. Madam President, despite the fact that the odds remain stacked against us, St. Lucia must still persist. I have an obligation to the people of my country and so I must find new and innovative ways regardless of how difficult to keep my country growing and to ensure and enhance the environment of social protections. I do not have the luxury to wait for the international system to adjust to the special needs of countries like my own. While natural disasters continue to threaten and erode the gains we make. In preparation for this hurricane season, St. Lucia has had to spend three times the amount of money that we did last season. In order to meet those costs, we have had to impose new taxes to facilitate our preparedness. For example, we have introduced a water tax to assist with the desilting of our dam, a gas tax to assist with the road rehabilitation and slope stabilization, and an airport tax to assist with the development of our new terminal, highway, and flood mitigation around the airport. St. Lucia is moving forward with an aggressive agenda to reform our institutions and to build a more resilient country. We're making difficult decisions and are committed to increasing the productivity of our government through the use of e-government. I want to acknowledge and thank Estonia for their assistance in this area. We're building resilience with the support of the UAE who gave us assistance with engineers and loans from Taiwan to be able to rebuild our roads and to rebuild our airport. I want to thank my citizens in particular for the continued support and understanding. We will play our part in adaptation of our economy and we will adapt to the new normal. Madam President, the President of the World Bank has acknowledged, and I quote, Good health is the foundation of a country's human capital, and no country can afford low quality or unsafe health, end of quote. The challenge of providing adequate and affordable health care is another area of focus for St. Lucia. We understand that the preventive and affordable health care is critical for the social development of any nation. More so as a small state with small population. We are plagued with incidents of individuals who delay in seeking early medical assistance due to the high cost, only to be saddled with the serious diagnosis later. A burden to the state and the individual that becomes far more expensive than the earlier cost. We have therefore taken steps to address the issue from the multiple of angles. We are working with partners like the European Union and the World Bank with the goal of implementing the necessary policies and legislation to give life to a national health insurance scheme. We are also looking into preventive approaches such as the imposition of appropriate labeling and sugar tax as we grapple with the high prevalence of non-communicable diseases. We are also expanding our after school programs that focus on building healthy lifestyles through physical activity and diet. We are establishing sports academies complete with nutritionists who will be community based so that their expertise can be shared. Madam President, St. Lucia has worked hard to grow and develop within the context of an international system that acknowledges our existence and needs only theoretically because the practical and tangible manifestation of these acknowledgments is rarely seen or felt. We've seen the disastrous impact of natural disasters brought on by the changes in our climate. Madam President, as I speak, my country is suffering from the ravages of Kirk, which was on a projected course north of my island, but changed direction overnight and moved directly over St. Lucia. This morning, St. Lucia also suffered from an earthquake. Early reports indicate the damage to our utilities that remain above ground and extensive damage to our agricultural sector. Once again, my heart goes out to the hardworking men and women and to the communities who depend on our culture. But be assured, regardless of the difficulties, we will provide the necessary support to help them recover as quickly as possible. My thoughts and prayers are with the government and the people of Barbados who have also been impacted and for St. Vincent and the Grenadines who now lie in the path of the storm and also for Martinique who also suffered the earthquake this morning. Our resilience as a people and our ability to pick ourselves up should never be used against us. I applaud Japan, India, and the numerous states within the United States of America who have the capacity to effectively respond to natural disasters. I envy that they have the necessary fiscal and policy space to enable them to recover and rebuild effectively. But we as SIDS are continually denied disability. We're aware that Dominica, the British Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico, among others, are still recovering one year later. Yet little has changed. The Caracom UN High-Level Pledging Conference, to support reconstruction efforts in the region following Hurricanes Irma and Maria, received pledges of over 1.3 billion. But there remains a significant gap between the pledges made and the actual amounts that have been dispersed. While well-intended, we have been let down once again. My delegation welcomes the initiative to convene a high-level meeting on the challenges of middle-income countries during this 73rd session of the General Assembly. Sanlusha has continued to place our concerns about debt sustainability on the global agenda. We have joined the call for the creation of a highly indebted middle-income country initiative based not only on the urgent need for debt relief, but also on the need to acknowledge and highlight the negative implications of the challenges that middle-income countries face in accessing concessionary financing. So vital to building resilience in our countries. We fare a business-as-usual approach to this meeting, but remain hopeful that it provides substantive outputs with actionable solutions. Madam President, multilateralism is under threat. We've heard the cries from the leaders this week. The winds of nationalism that threaten to blow us away from our collective endeavors here at United Nations are growing. But Sanlusha believes that it's only within a strong, functional, multilateral system that the guarantees of world peace and security can be provided. To borrow from our distinguished Secretary General Antonio Guterres, and I quote, in a world in which all problems are global, there is no way countries can handle issues by themselves. We need global responses, end of quote. The ongoing reform of the United Nations system is critical. The increasingly chaotic world requires an organization that is responsive and efficient and that reflects the political and economic reality of a changing world and of all of its member states. We can no longer operate within a framework of ideologies, policies, institutions, and patterns of behavior that were established in a time long past to deal with circumstances long gone. We must be willing to challenge discrimination and exclusion if we endeavor to create an equal and just world for all. Every country has a role to play in this global environment. We know. We know this. Sanusha joins the other voices calling for an end to the over half-century-old embargo imposed on our neighbor Cuba, and for an end to all of the restrictions on the rights of the Cuban people, to liberty, security, and the advancement. Similarly, we call for an end to the restrictions placed on the legitimate aspirations of Taiwan to participate as an observer in key international institutions such as WHO, IKO, and UNFCCC. My friends, this is much as it is for us as it is for them. In our hemisphere where confrontations and disagreements exist, I reaffirm Sanusha's position that all conflicts must be resolved through diplomatic channels. As we work toward reform of this institution, we must ensure that no one is left behind. We must find the political will and the courage to ensure that the evolved United Nations not only acknowledge the challenges of its membership, but that it provides adequate solutions for us all. Prime President, notwithstanding the myriad of challenges that frame our engagement in the international system, Sanusha remains committed to the objectives of multilateralism. The adoption of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development was a triumph of multilateral cooperation, but it is the successful implementation of the agenda, the fulfillment of the promises of its purpose that will define the true measure of our collective will to transform and develop as a global community. It is within this context that Sanusha has committed to present our voluntary national review of our progress in implementing the 2030 Agenda at the 2019 high-level political forum. I am also pleased to report that Sanusha will be depositing the required instrument to ratify the DOA amendment to the KODA protocol before the start of COP 24. This week Sanusha also reaffirmed our commitment to international law by signing on to the regional agreement on the access to information, public participation, and justice in the environmental matters in Latin America and the Caribbean, and the treaty on the non-prolification of nuclear weapons. In order to build peaceful, equitable, and sustainable societies, SIDS and SIDS who are MICs have to look to a different course of action in order to arrive at a more immediate solution to our development challenges, while we continue to call for the changes in the international system. Sanusha has recorded two successive years of consistent economic growth. We've grown our tax revenue and are on pace to attract a record foreign direct investment. We are still competing, having to find new ways to ensure our growth and development. But imagine how much better we could have done in building our economy and our social resilience and to be able to further enhance our ability to meet our sustainable development goals and to improve the quality of life of our citizens if only a fair and just international enabling environment was made available to us. Madam President, let's not forget that we come together here as Nations United to build institutions, norms and rules to advance shared interests, interests of all, not of a select few. The enormous challenges of our moment in history require a renewed social contract, one based on shared responsibility and the space to achieve this global compact is right here at the United Nations. Let us draw on the inspiration of Nelson Mandela and his incredible ability to forgive and find solutions for the greater human good. There is a Buddhist proverb that reads, and I quote, to know and not to do is yet not to know. If we claim to know and accept that special circumstances and vulnerabilities of the SIDS and yet we do nothing to remedy the systems and the framework that exasperate our vulnerability, can we say that we really know? Have we truly accepted the evidence? While the answer to these questions may not be readily available, countries like my own have charted a development path through this changing and volatile world. It is my hope that as a multilateralism evolves and with it, this institution, we arrive at knowing and at doing what must be done. Thank you.