Women in the Caribbean (March 10, 2021)

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Women's Rights activists mark International Women's Day in Puerto Rico

Women and Covid

• Women are "on the frontlines" of the fight against Covid-19, but underrepresented in global and national health leadership, said Pan American Health Organization director Carissa Etienne on International Women's Day. "Women make up the great majority of healthcare workers. They head households and are the main providers for many of those households -- much of this is unpaid work and in the informal labor workforce," she noted. (Caribbean News Service)

• The pandemic is worsening gender inequalities in the Caribbean labor market, according to an IDB report. More single-headed female households reported going to bed hungry or eating less healthy than men. There was also a reported rise in domestic violence towards women, particularly amongst lower-income households and especially in Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago.

Women and Reparations

• Understanding the gendered political economy of slavery is crucial to present-day discussions around reparation, argues Verene Shepherd, director of the Centre for Reparation Research at the University of the West Indies. Women represented approximately 30 percent of the estimated 15 million Africans forcefully transported to the Caribbean from the 15th to the 19th centuries. Added to the abuse of their bodies through an arduous field régime and severe punishment for perceived infractions of the “slave codes," enslaved women experienced sexploitation. Colonial statutes and codes invested them with no rights over their own bodies.

Women and Political Representation

• “On average, 22% of ministerial portfolios/cabinet positions in the Anglophone Caribbean are held by women," according to the United Nations. "Across the region, women generally do not hold more than 30% of elected positions with the exception of Guyana (which has a legislated quota of one-third of the number of political nominees must be women) and Trinidad and Tobago.” Loop News highlights women in leadership positions in the Caribbean, including Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley.

Gender and LGBTQI

• Black Island Girl is a new platform launched to explore issues that affect Caribbean women of African descent by Dominican-Canadian Jael Joseph, a media personality, influencer, content creator and journalism student. (Loop)

• LGBTQI activist Maurice Tomlinson's judicial challenge to Jamaica's anti-sodomy law restarted on Monday. His case will rely on two scathing Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reports, which found, the law contributes to almost daily abuse, harassment and often murder of LGBT Jamaicans and is also a reason that the island has the highest HIV prevalence rate among men who have sex with men in the Western Hemisphere, 33%. (Erasing 76 Crimes, see last week's Just Caribbean Updates)

• Religious homophobia is a major reason Jamaica lags other countries in recognizing LGBT human rights, argues Tomlinson in Erasing 76 Crimes.

Public Security

• Haitian gang leader Arnel Joseph, who was killed after a deadly Haiti prison break last month, may have been sprung intentionally — raising further concerns about toxic relationships between gangs and political elites in the run-up to new elections, reports InSight Crime.

Climate Justice and Energy

• The climate crisis is pushing the planet’s tropical regions towards the limits of human livability, with rising heat and humidity threatening to plunge much of the world’s population into potentially lethal conditions, reports the Guardian.

• The recently launched Barbados Sustainable Energy Investment Programme, also known as Smart Fund II, is a $90 million investment fund that aims to kick-start carbon-neutral energy projects. It is being financed with a $30 million investment loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and a $15 million investment grant provided by the European Union. Barbados aims for total reliance on green energy by 2030. (Barbados Today)
  

• Racial division is a long-standing problem in Guyana, but has been fuelled in recent years by the discovery of major offshore oil deposits which have raised the stakes of racialized domestic political competition. In Current History, historians Arif Bulkan and Alissa Trotz situate Guyana’s recent election standoff in a longer, relatively unbroken trajectory of racially divisive politics. They explore how historically oppressed peoples have directed their hostility at each other while governments have worked with extractive industries to perpetuate a neo-imperial economic dependence structure.

• The former chairman of Petrojam, Perceval Bahado-Singh, has been slapped with multiple fraud charges related to the time he led Jamaica's sole petroleum refinery, announced the Major Organised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency (MOCA). (Barbados Today)
  

• French oil company Total plans to begin developing oil fields at Suriname’s Block 58 as early as 2025, around five years after the first major discovery was made at Maka Central-1. (Oil Now)

• ExxonMobil is forging ahead with plans for its fourth development in the Guyana Stabroek block, Yellowtail. Though it is not planning to submit the field development plan (FDP) for government review until the end of the year, the company has already started putting out tenders, reports Kaieteur News.

• Guyana government officials said a 14 billion cubic feet flaring quota for ExxonMobil’s Liza-1 project, recently cited by vice president Bharrat Jagdeo, is, in fact, not in its environmental permit. The company maintained that it never used the figure to justify its flaring, reports Stabroek News. (See last week's Just Caribbean Updates.)

• This week the United Nations launched Regional Climate Weeks, its latest initiative to further discussions about climate change and the steps necessary to mitigate its global impact. (Breaking Belize News)
  

Indigenous Peoples

• Water is a major challenge for the new Accompong Maroons' Chief Richard Currie in Jamaica. The group lives in Cockpit Country— the largest remaining natural forest in Jamaica -- which supplies the country 40 percent of its fresh water, but lacks running water, reports Forbes. Among the crops that Currie says could be easily brought under the umbrella of sustainable development are ginger, breadfruit, yams, castor oil, sorrel, potatoes, peppers, bananas, plantains and turmeric.

Human Trafficking

• Trafficking of children and adolescents along the Haiti-Dominican Republic border has increased, according to activists. (Caribbean News Service)

Economic and Fiscal Justice

• OECD countries and their dependencies are responsible for 68 per cent of the world’s corporate tax abuse, according to this year's Corporate Tax Haven Index. The index documents the ways in which global corporate tax rules set by the OECD failed to detect and prevent corporate tax abuse enabled by the OECD’s own member countries – and in some cases, pushed countries to roll back their tax transparency. (Tax Justice Network, h/t Primera Mañana)
• Countries graded by the OECD as “not harmful” are responsible for 98% of the world’s corporate tax abuses risks, the report said, adding that the UN should take over the role of fostering global tax rules. (Guardian)
• See January 28's Just Caribbean Updates for Caribbean critiques of the European Union's tax haven blacklist. Caribbean Economist Marla Dukharan has noted that the use of tax and anti-money laundering requirements “effectively discriminate[s] against smaller and mostly nonwhite countries to make it harder for them to compete economically.”
• Puerto Rico filed a debt-restructuring plan that includes a proposed cut of up to 8.5% to monthly pensions of at least $1,500. (NBC)

Human Rights

• Guyanan Arif Bulkan, a senior lecturer at the University of the West Indies, has been elected as one of three vice chairs of the United Nations Human Rights Committee. (News Room)

Covid-19 Impact

• The IDB Jamaica Civil Society Consulting Group is calling on the Government to establish a National Commission on COVID-19 that would help to drive a more strategic, proactive, and enhanced response to the raging pandemic. (Petchary's Blog)

• The St. Vincent and the Grenadines Teachers Union says it is concerned that the country could lose a generation of students as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. (iWitness News)

• The pandemic has pointed to the absence of a region-wide integrated approach to food security and CARICOM member states’ continuing failure to address the logistical and infrastructural challenge of having efficient intra-Caribbean shipping and air transport links, among other things, writes David Jessop for the Caribbean Council.

Diaspora

• Allegations by former British royals, Prince Harry and Meghan, that an unnamed member of the royal family had “concerns” over the colour of their unborn baby’s skin have raised a thorny question for many countries with historic ties to Britain, according to the Jamaica Gleaner: Do those nations really want to be so closely connected to Britain and its royal family anymore?

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