Sir Ronald Sanders made the call at a Conference on Investing in the Caribbean held in London Thursday at the initiative of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair.

The Conference was attended by businesspeople from the Caribbean and Britain as well as three Caribbean Heads of Government.

Sanders drew attention to a report published this week by Sir Nicholas Stern, former Chief Economist at the World Bank, which said: “Millions will die from malnutrition, diarrhoea, malaria and dengue fever unless effective controls are in place. There will be acute risks all over the world from the Inuits in the Arctic to the inhabitants of small islands in the Caribbean and Pacific”.

At the present rate of carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, global temperatures could rise by as much as five degrees Celsius, according to the report.

Making the point that the Caribbean accounts for only 0.1% of carbon dioxide emissions while countries such as the United States account for 25%, Sanders argued that African, Caribbean and Pacific stated would suffer for the excesses not only of developed countries but also of large developing ones such as China and India.

“Today, we can not talk about Economic Partnership agreements between the EU and ACP, if such agreements do not take account of the damage being done to small developing countries by the industrialised ones”, Sir Ronald declared.

In his weekly commentary published today, Sir Ronald returned to the problem saying that the Stern report makes grim reading.  Among the troubling projections are:

• 200 million people are at risk of being driven from their homes by flood or drought by 2050
• 60 million Africans could be exposed to Malaria if world temperatures rise by 2°C
• 4 billion people could suffer from water shortages if temperatures rise by 2°C

The report states that if nothing is done about global warming the world economy would shrink by up to 20 per cent, equating to a figure of almost US$2 trillion a year.  According to Sir Ronald, “Developing countries would, of course, be hardest hit with poverty increasing, disease spreading, trade worsening and hundreds of millions of people dying”.