Barbados and Senegal on Wednesday signalled their intention to work together on issues facing both countries, particularly water management and agriculture, as President Macky Sall began the first full day of his state visit.
Following a bilateral meeting at Lloyd Erskine Sandiford Conference Centre, representatives of both countries signed a Memorandum of Understanding on Political Cooperation to lay the foundation for deeper collaboration.
At a joint press conference, Prime Minister Mia Mottley and President Sall outlined how the cooperation between the two nations would take shape.
Mottley said a cooperation deal includes tourism and airlift connectivity, culture, film, the arts, sports, bioscience and medicine, investment opportunities and renewable energy. She also stressed the importance of the agriculture sector to both states, noting that there was room for partnerships in fisheries, fish processing and the development of aquaculture and mariculture.
Touching on water scarcity as a major issue facing the West African state and Barbados, she said: “It is hampering our ability to be able to attain food security and nutritional security as we would like. We, therefore, have to be finding novel ways of ensuring that we are not only dependent on the climate in order to be able to provide the irrigation necessary to produce our food. Senegal, like Barbados, has groundwater, but the groundwater is diminishing in Senegal as it is in Barbados. Both of us are having to rely on desalination, not only of salt water but in our case, brackish water, as well with them.”
Mottley added that the two nations were interested in teaming up to procure items to improve the water situation in both countries.
She told journalists: “We discussed, just now at the very last minute as well, what may be some of the possibilities for joint pooling of procurement in the same way that we did with the African medical supplies platform because all of us are buying pipe, all of us are buying fittings, all of us are buying pumps, but we all buy at very high prices because we’ve not found a way to be able to pool our resources and to have a similar joint procurement platform.
“This is bigger than just Barbados and Senegal and we hope therefore that we can interest the African Union and CARICOM [the Caribbean Community] to be able to recognise that we can be a global powerhouse that shapes markets rather than being a victim of markets and its prices and access.”
President Sall also said that both countries would be looking to use renewable energy to desalinate the water they use.
“One of the best ways to have fresh water is to desalinate it . . . because the water in the sea never finishes,” he said, noting that solar or wind-generated electricity could be cheaper and more sustainable means of desalting water.
The Senegalese leader, on his first visit to Barbados, indicated that Dakar was keen to deepen its relationship with Bridgetown given Barbados’ position as a global powerhouse in climate change advocacy. He said the French-speaking African state also wanted to support the Bridgetown Initiative and be a part of the movement towards the restructuring of international financial institutions.
He added that he also wanted to explore possibilities in the areas of vocational training and skilled labour.
President Sall said that both nations were separated by pain historically and it was time to work together and build each other up.
(SZB)
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