 The Assembly will hear a statement by His Excellency Alan Michael Chastonet, Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Economic Growth, Job Creation, External Affairs and the Public Service. May I request protocol to escort His Excellency. I have great pleasure in welcoming the Prime Minister of St. Lucia, His Excellency Alan Michael Chastonet. I invite him to address the General Assembly. Mr President, St. Lucia congratulates you on your assumption of the presidency of the 72nd Session of the United Nations General Assembly and assures you of the full support and cooperation of our delegation during our tenure. We thank your predecessor, His Excellency Ambassador Peter Thompson of Fiji, for his able stewardship of this assembly during the past year. Mr President, for small island states like my own in the Caribbean region, this promise of the United Nations is being tested today more than ever. The world is experiencing extraordinary change at a breathtaking pace, change that is reshaping the way we live, the way we work, our planet and the very nature of peace and security. I arrived in New York earlier this week after a tour of the devastation wrought by Hurricane Irma on islands in the Caribbean and for the entire week I have been engaged in discussions focused on the region's recovery efforts. I have also watched from afar and with a heavy heart for the destruction to my region of Hurricane Maria's crushing blow to the sister isles of Dominica and Puerto Rico, claiming many lives and saddling them with hundreds of millions if not billions in damage. I have also listened in dismay to the silence of many and the weak acknowledgement by others on the crisis in our region. It has awakened in me the fear that we may be on our own to chart a path forward for our region. Mr President, while some continue to doubt and deny the assessments of science, it is impossible to avoid the facts of climate change. In less than a month, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Cuba, the British Virgin Islands, and Gwilla, the Dominican Republic, St. Bart's, St. John's, St. Thomas, and Turks and Caicos, St. Martin, St. Martin all have been victim to the ravages of the hurricanes that have left death and carnage in their wake. And may I also add, Florida and Texas, the impact has been without discrimination. Let us acknowledge the fact that the small island developing states have repeatedly warned the international community that the failure to adequately respond to climate change would betray our children and condemn future generations to certain doom. I daresay that we do not have the luxury to be silent on this front anymore. We must act now. The effect of natural disasters does not have a diplomatic solution. What is needed is tangible action. The future is now and the challenges are profound. What is fast becoming the new normal is the intensification of extreme weather events which demands from us real solutions in real time. No longer can we depend on all mechanisms with dense bureaucracies that delay or limit a nation's ability to safeguard its citizens during a crisis and slow the rebuilding effort. I remind all here that St. Lucia, along with most of our sister Icaracum states, are anchored at the heart of Hurricane Alley with our people on the front line and to often the first to endure the ravages of mother's nature's fury when the storms come off the Atlantic Ocean. Today, as we look to the world for leadership and partnership, we thank France, China, and Germany for their continued leadership on climate change issues. The government and the people offer our most sincere condolences and whether whatever support that we can to those in need. The ties that bind our people run deep. The pain of one is the pain of all. We ask that global community follow this ethos. Never forget that we are one global ecosystem that demands that we all be our brother's keeper. Our noble laureate, Sir Derek Walcott, speaks to the sense of responsibility to one's neighbor that is rooted in our cultural DNA and the imperative of helping, not out of a sense of duty, but out of a sense of community. This Mr. President was exemplified by Premier Dr. Orlando Smith of the British Virgin Islands. As Dominica faced the imminent threat of Hurricane Maria, Dr. Smith, whose own island had already been brutalized by Hurricane Irma, offered his unwavering support to the Prime Minister, Scarlett of Dominica. Even in our destitution, we in the Caribbean open our hearts and our means to those in need. I pause here also to share our condolences to others in our hemisphere, notably so Mexico, who has long been of our support, but now faces a mounting death toll from earthquakes that have struck that country. Mr. President, I stand here and ask that we revisit many of the lofty goals as we see inequity as the heart of all our discussions and seek to address it. That of multilateral discussions on development, on resilience, and the sustainable development of our countries, be equitable and just. We must acknowledge that UN will never succeed with only a few prosper and a growing many do not. How can we, when the progress we make is fragile and unequal? How can we, when we indulge our differences to the exclusion of the work we must do together? How can we, when inequity remains the driving force of our international system, propelling some forward and leaving far too many behind? How can we, as leaders talk about sustainable development goals, when the people of our countries continue to struggle just to survive? Fundamentally, our global reality is an increasingly integrated one. No one is spared the perils of the convulsions in our world. Our economies, natural environment, and people are all connected. We in this hemisphere are not impervious to the impact of war and the starvation in the Middle East and Africa, of the persecution in Asia. We are stacked in a global role of dominoes. We are a disruptive event in one country that gets similar or worse events in neighboring countries and spreads impacting us all and testing our social, political, and economic systems. We live in a world of imperfect choices. Choices between clinging to all systems that do not serve us and rethinking new ways to secure a better future. We must not turn away from the hard choices. We must not fair change. Our challenges are real, serious, and many. We, United Nations, must get better at the policies that strike at the root of the problem and ground our 17 sustainable development goals in one word, equity. I must repeat a point stated earlier that in a time where inequity pervades every aspect of our international order, what hope do we have to successfully implement the SDGs when the desk, the deck is stacked against many of our people? How do we ensure that all citizens have the most basic needs like food on their plates when we struggle from crisis to crisis? We must agree that there should be a minimum standard of living for each and every one of our citizens. And we must maintain base standards that provide adequate health care, education, housing, security, and economic opportunity for every citizen in our countries. Without establishing such standards, we cannot engage in any meaningful discussion or action plan for sustainable development. This is what will stem the flow of migration. This is what will offer opportunities for them to be productive members of our society. This is what will dull the urge that drives some to crime and others into the arms of groups that ferment evil. Any overhaul of the UN system must be founded on the principle of equity without which sustainable development goals are dreams that go away when we open our eyes to the constant state of crisis. Mr. President, I take this moment to assure the Secretary General of my country's support in the necessary effort to reform this institution to address a new era of responsibility. At the heart of any reform of this nature, we must all, nations large and small, play our role to protect the rights of individuals everywhere. In the face of mounting challenges, we must seek the courage and the wisdom to act boldly and collectively to revise outmoded programs that are so glaringly inadequate and to the needs of our time. We have to harness new ideas and technology and to invest in the individuals and the generations that will build our future. We must see more in terms of outcomes and less in terms of bureaucracy. We must come here to make a difference and to be able to return to our homes delivering on the promise that we make. The mobilization of the leadership of the world to come here is all for naught if we don't deliver. We must come here to make a difference and not get carried away by the name-calling, but instead ground our discourse in common respect and a commitment to deliver to those we lead. Mr. President, we must understand and acknowledge that when times change, so must we. Our claims to the fidelity to the words of the Charter mean nothing if we do not create new responses to old and new challenges. We must be the source of hope to the poor, the sick, the marginalized to ensure peace and a decent life for all of our citizens on a sustainable planet. This requires the constant advance of the principles of our Charter. The commitments we make to each other must be honored thereby strengthening our trust. Within and beyond this organization, we must look more honestly at how we categorize each other and how the development and donor community rank us. How can we call a country a middle income one today based solely on its per capita GDP? When we know that its geographic location renders it vulnerable to natural disasters that have the capacity to bring it and its people to their knees. It is unconscionable to see our peers have to beg and plead for goodwill and to have to depend on commercial rates to rebuild broken economies, all because the traditional system is so unyielding, our cake in its design and at times heartless. This model must change to one that allows small and developing nations the real opportunity to survive and thrive in an increasingly cold global environment. The model has to change to allow us all the opportunity to build back stronger and more resilient the infrastructure that can secure our futures and that of our people. Mr. President, the people of my region are resilient. We are a people and a region committed to working together to rebuild stronger and better. In times of challenge, we do not hesitate to commit our scarce resources to each other. Truly being our brother's keeper. We've also been very fortunate to receive support from friends near and far as we seek to make a better world for those who will follow us. In our case, friendships like those that we have with Taiwan, Cuba and Mexico, amongst others, allow us to envision a positive future. I ask that, well, we may come from different places and with different priorities, we must never forget that we share a common future. A future that will only be secure if we meet threats, challenges and opportunities together with greater cooperation and understanding. Our generation's task is to engage in a common effort and towards a common purpose, to answer the call of our times. Let it be said by our children's children that we were tested and we did not fail, but we delivered to future generations a better world. We have that obligation to our people and to our world. I thank you.