Finance Minister calls on Islamic Council to lobby for climate, food security, energy transition financing

Mar 18, 2023 News

Kaieteur News – During his address at the 49th Meeting of the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation – Guyana’s Finance Minister, Dr. Ashni Singh, called on the Islamic Council to lobby the global community to mobilise financing that will be used towards climate and food security as well and bolster the energy transition.

Minister of Finance, Dr. Ashni Singh

Dr. Singh is Guyana’s lone representative at the 49th Session of the Islamic Council which is being held in Nouakchott, Mauritania.

“I wish to highlight three dimensions of resilience which are particularly important to us in Guyana: climate security, food security, and energy security,” Minister Singh said.

He stated that the climate crisis represents an existential threat to the planet and that it requires a collective global effort.

“…Guyana calls on the global community to recognize that there is no solution to the climate crisis without forests, and that concerted action on forests is needed given the role of forests not only in the fight against climate change but also in protecting biodiversity and in combating desertification. Guyana also remains firmly in solidarity with all vulnerable countries in the struggle for improved access to financing for adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage,” Dr. Singh said.

Secondly, Minister Singh spoke about food security. He stated that the ongoing onslaught of climate change along with COVID-19 and the war in Ukraine combined to reverse many of the gains that were made as a global community in improving food security.

“In Guyana, under the leadership of His Excellency President Ali, we have spearheaded the preparation of a strategy for the Caribbean Region to address food security. This strategy aims at increasing food production and productivity, ramping up agro-processing and value-added production, and promoting agri-business and intra-regional trade in food products,” the Guyanese minister said.

During his speech, Dr. Singh urged the Council to call on the global community to leverage financial resources both public and private to increase food production, deploy science and technology to raise productivity, and remove barriers to regional and global trade in food products.

Thirdly, he said that energy security is inextricably linked to both of the former two issues.  Dr. Singh noted that adequate and competitively priced energy is critical for the viability of value-added production.  To this end, he added that the transition to cleaner sources of energy is also critical in the fight against climate change, saying too that ramping up energy production and transitioning to cleaner energy require significant financial investment by both the public and private sectors.

He continued, “We urge this Council to call on the global community to recognize the crippling energy deficit in so many of our countries and to mobilize financial resources to help address this deficit while at the same time support the transition to cleaner sources of energy.”

• climate, energy, Finance Minister, food security, Islamic Council