Remarks by the Director General of the OECS: Signing of the Letter of Agreement between CARPHA and the OECS to Strengthen Travellers’ Health for a More Resilient, Economically Sustainable Eastern Caribbean

Dr Lisa Indar, Executive Director of CARPHA; Colleagues from the CARPHA team here with us and those joining online; Members of the OECS Commission’s senior leadership and staff; Friends of the Media.

Good morning, and welcome.

Dr Indar, permit me a special word of welcome. This is your first in-person engagement at the OECS Commission since your appointment, and it is fitting that we mark it not with ceremony alone, but with substance, with an act that carries our long partnership forward.

We gather this morning to sign a document with the simple attachment of signatures but what we are affirming today is something larger. It is a partnership that has quietly and consistently over many years delivered practical value to the people of this region. And the true measure of any partnership is never the number of agreements we sign; it is the impact those agreements have on the lives and livelihoods of our citizens.

But let me be candid about the world in which we sign. The world into which we welcome our visitors, and through which we send our own people, is not the world of a decade ago. Pathogens now travel at the speed of aircraft. Viruses mutate faster than institutions built to react, and each new variant is a reminder that the microbial world respects none of our conveniences: not our borders, not our economies, not our tourism calendars.

For small island states, this is not an abstraction. Our openness is at once our livelihood and our exposure. The very connectivity that sustains our tourism economy is the same connectivity through which contagion travels. A health event anywhere in our archipelago is, within hours, a shared vulnerability everywhere. In an age of pandemic mutation and emerging disease, health security is not a matter for the health sector alone- it is a matter of regional survival.

Against a threat that crosses borders freely, no single island can stand alone. Consider the chain of lighthouses that once guarded these waters, each island tending its own light, yet every light burning for the safety of all, so that a danger sighted from one shore became a warning shared across the whole archipelago. That is what this Letter of Agreement builds into public health: a shared watch, in which the vigilance of each Member State strengthens the security of every other. It gives us something no country of our size can build alone: collective surveillance, early warning, and the technical depth to see a threat forming before it reaches our shores.

This is where CARPHA’s leadership matters. This Agreement builds on years of collaboration - on our joint work in surveillance, in pandemic preparedness, and through the Tourism and Health Programme. Dr Indar, I thank you and your team for the technical excellence you bring, and for a partnership grounded in trust rather than transaction.

Our Sustainable Tourism Policy recognises that competitiveness, resilience and sustainability are inseparable. A destination is only as attractive as it is safe. Health security, then, is not an add-on to tourism. It is one of its foundational pillars. When we strengthen surveillance, raise health and safety standards, and build capacity across our Member States, we are not choosing between protecting our people and protecting our economy. We are doing both with a single instrument.

Several of our Member States have already made real progress in implementing the Tourism and Health Programme, and I commend them. But our collective resilience is only as strong as the weakest system we tolerate among us. Through this renewed Agreement, our aim is to ensure that no Member State is left behind, that implementation is coordinated, even, and sustainable across the whole of the OECS.

The challenges before us - pandemics, climate impacts, emerging health risks - will continue to evolve. Our response must be equally forward-looking. This Agreement positions the OECS and CARPHA to help our Member States anticipate risk, rather than merely react to it. In public health, the difference between anticipation and reaction is very often the difference between an incident and a catastrophe.

So today we move beyond commitment to implementation; beyond intention to impact. We are building, together, a healthier, safer and more resilient region - doing for one another what none of us could do alone, and standing watch, together, over the wellbeing of our people.

Dr Indar, colleagues - thank you. Let us sign.