Statement delivered by H.E. Patrick Boisvert, Minister of Economy and Finance, Haiti
V20 MINISTERIAL DIALOGUE IX
16 October 2022
H.E. Patrick Boisvert, Minister of Economy and Finance, Haiti
Thank you, Mr. President. Dear Colleagues, Ministers, V20 Partners, I want to thank the Secretariat of the V20, Ghana, for the quality of the documents and the decisions made to organize this meeting. Climate change brings huge risks for Haiti, especially on the middle and long-term. The increase of water level, typhoons, drought, and many other problems that Haiti is facing are having an impact on productivity, on exports, on currency revenues, and food security.
Haiti faces the repercussions of climate change, but it also faces multi-dimensional crises and food insecurity will have a huge impact on 50 percent of the population. In order to face this exposure to the major risks, and the lack of fiscal margin, we need financing in order to increase our resilience. At this point, when we have natural catastrophe, we only can use our emergency local funds and we need to benefit from the countries supporting us in order to increase our budget and when we do so, it is at the expense of the development finance.
We also have insurance policies that are very important for us, but this is not enough given the challenges. In order to find solutions, we are working on setting a strategy for financing risks and a financial resilience that would allow us to mitigate the social and economic repercussions of climate change. Mobilizing external resources in order to finance our climate programs is an emergency.
So, we approve of the course by the V20 in calling rich countries to do more to face climate change and following, also, the Agreement of Paris in order to bring $100 billion dollars a year to face climate change. We need also to reduce greenhouse gas emission and support economies to adapt to climate change. It is very important for countries like Haiti to be able to benefit through less costly financial instruments in order to not increase the debt of these countries.
We also want to concentrate on carbon financing, and we support also the RST adopted by the IMF. But we need to have better conditions for small countries and island countries to be able to benefit from the mechanism. We also want the World Bank to support us in the framework of the programs adopted also by the V20.
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