Guyana fully committed to Caricom’s push for regional integration, climate action, food security – President Ali

In a compelling CARICOM Day message, President Dr Irfaan Ali reaffirmed Guyana’s steadfast commitment to deepening regional integration, tackling climate change and strengthening food and energy security across CARICOM.
Describing CARICOM as a “towering symbol of unity and cooperation for more than five decades,” President Ali called on Caribbean nations to move beyond rhetoric and embrace bold, strategic collaboration in the face of mounting global and regional challenges.
Additionally, highlighting the region’s vulnerability to natural disasters, external market shocks and transnational crime, Ali described CARICOM as a “collective shield and moral compass”. With this in mind, he called on member states to expand intra-regional trade, advance food security, ensure sustainable energy systems and defend democracy and regional peace.
“We must vigorously strengthen and strategically expand intra-regional trade, aggressively advance our efforts toward long-term food security, and ensure resilient energy systems and sustainable environmental protections. Guyana is committed to playing its part in these ambitious undertakings—whether through our growing food production capacity, emerging energy resources or our support for regional mechanisms aimed at deepening integration. At the same time, we must continue to engage traditional partners while proactively forging new strategic alliances, so as to guard against the looming threat of economic protectionism that endangers the economic sovereignty of small and vulnerable states,” the Guyanese leader said.
Guyana, the Head of State noted, is playing its part by leveraging its expanding food production, emerging energy resources, and diplomatic partnerships to help the region become more self-reliant and resilient.
Ali also emphasised the inviolability of democratic values, warning that the sustainability of the regional integration project depends on respecting the will of the people and resisting threats to democratic governance.
“Importantly, we must also safeguard and vigorously defend our cherished democratic traditions. The strength and viability of our regional project depend on the preservation and integrity of the democratic values we hold dear. Our member states must remain firmly within the democratic fold, ensuring that the respect for the democratic will of the people remains eternally inviolable,” he said.
Similar sentiments were on Sunday echoed by Chair of CARICOM and Prime Minister of Jamaica Dr Andrew Holness, when he addressed the 49th Regular Meeting of the CARICOM Heads of Government in Montego Bay, Jamaica, from July 6-8, 2025.
In his speech, the CARICOM Chair emphasised that “human development must be the centre of the integration mission”, noting that “the world is not unipolar and that there are opportunities that member states must explore”
“As a community, we must strengthen South-South cooperation, we must strengthen our trade cooperation with Africa, and we must strengthen our internal cooperation. The resources in CARICOM are sufficient for us to provide for the needs of our people. Guyana with energy and land, Suriname with energy and land, Trinidad, Jamaica with incredible human resources. What has stopped us for these many years? We have been saying we really want to get it. Did we really want it? I think that the emerging global situation must now push us to really get it now. We can get it, because the time to get prosperity for our people is now. But that prosperity must be inclusive,” the CARICOM Chair said. According to Holness, achieving these goals requires member states to collectively develop targeted policies that allow for seamless adoption.
“Sustainability and resilience are the two new buzzwords now that every Government must focus on. And so it is that the policies that we will pursue in CARICOM, whatever it is, whether it is the institutional structures that we will have to re-examine, the trade policies that we will have to pursue, the security policies that we will have to pursue, they must be pursued through the prism, through the lens of sustainability and resilience. So Jamaica will continue to champion initiatives that will make these three pillars, people, partnership and prosperity, not just aspirational. Because we have seen leaders come before with these aspirations. We have seen the words expressed before. The problem has always been our ability to be bold enough, strategic enough, systematic enough, disciplined enough to convert these dreams and aspirations, these words, into reality,” he added.