For years the people of Montserrat spoke of the goal of sustainable growth and development and for years the means to do that has eluded us.

As a result many of our people have sought to find by any means some way of sustaining life and family by migrating to other shores. We did this when the Panama canal sought workers and the sugar plantations in Cuba or Santo Domingo or even Florida needed workers to cut cane. We did this when the British during the so-called windrush generation, called for workers to rebuild the economy after World War II. We did this at the times when we found it necessary because our colonial master sought only to take from us all natural resources, either our people which we care about, as our only reliable export or they needed someway of indicating that they will be our benefactor. 

We are a resilient people and as such we have always sought ways and means to find the path to development even if it requires having to export ourselves to seek some means of sustenance for all our people. 

Unfortunately when we leave in most instances we did not return. Instead we tried our best to create circumstances where we could ask our people to join us, our families or friends and as a result we created a large diaspora. Larger than ourselves,  larger than those of us who remain on island. We also sought means to develop a sustainable and viable economy with little success. 

It is this desire for some form of sustainable growth and development that causes us to continue to struggle and continue to search for a viable path to that sustainability. 

In many ways we have been able from time to time to become, in appearance, somewhat sustainable. Or in some ways find a parth or what appears to be a viable path only to discover that it is not sustainable. 

We continue to look for solutions that our neighbors have sought and in some manner appear to be successful in finding ways for growth, but like us, most have found that they were not sustainable. Those identified by our neighbors as perhaps the Golden Egg, we found that those efforts by our neighbors did not fulfill our goals and thought perhaps we are not able to because we were too late or didn’t place much or enough emphasis on such pathways. For example, other islands found ways to sustain themselves through agriculture. So the banana era kept us at one point, it kept the islands at one point from sinking but never growing. 

In our case we developed a lime industry then a cotton industry in the hopes that these would keep us sustained, that they would allow us the opportunities for that growth and development result. When agriculture failed as it would, to be our main driver, our size and terrain making it prohibitive, we tried the path of tourism. When again our size and our local resources proved not to be adequate, we put a twist on it; we tried residential tourism as a substitute. That too we found was not sustainable due to our size. We recognize that a small industry that is dependent on our small population will never be sustainable but we try, We tried going down the path of a medical school which increased our local consumer base along with  the Radio Antilles experiment which assisted in boosting circumstances but never achieved the goal of sustainable growth. However, we tried in many ways to duplicate or perhaps find a substitute, that would assist in our lack resources and resorted to use of our position as a dependent territory as a gateway for manufacturing.  In our  case the finishing of a manufactured product to the UK or European market, when it was found that our neighbors were shut out; we tried the financial services sector; that too was shut down. 

Granted, all of these small endeavors, if it were possible to maintain might have done the trick but all of these were subject to failure because of a lack of indigenous resources or if they existed, those resources were severely limited. Sustainable growth requires a sustainable source of income to provide the means to develop and not to be dependent on others for its existence, for our existence. 

Apart from our human resources which allowed us through remittances to stay alive, left nothing for growth or sustainability. Our human resources were instead exported. This in itself only allowed us to stay afloat not swim. We needed still need to find a resource which we can depend on. It cannot be limited to fulfilling our local needs but must be counted on to provide us an income which we can use to fund our own initiatives for development and go in the direction of our longterm goal of viable and sustainable development. Without such a source we would continue to travel the paths that lead to dead ends or at best to assist in maintaining our life survival but not growth. 

We have survived in recent years catastrophic events. Which, in and of themselves, have contributed to the lack of sustainable development or should I say growth. In all of our efforts we saw some more economic growth after the most devastating hurricane in our history and reached a level of economic activity that we perceive to be growth. But it too was fleeting because we sustained a bigger devastating blow by the eruption of the Suffriere Hills Volcano.

The volcano placed us in the position that we now find ourselves for the last 25 years. It is most devastating because it simply exacerbated the dilema which had always been before us caused by our size the inability to maintain a population and the further restriction of our habitable land. We could no longer depend on our local ability to feed ourselves because our means to do so the land and the people to cultivate it were further restricted.

With our population depleted and our usable land space also depleted, we have been fortunate. The volcano brought us irrefutable evidence of a resource, an indigenous resource, that will be with us for as long as we exist. 

That resource is the energy that is demonstrated by the destructive power of the volcano itself.

The exploitation of the energy resource evidenced by the volcano is now manifest as the DEAL BREAKER. 

We now have the knowledge of the resource, and the available technical requirements to exploit this resource. We only lack at our fingertips the financial resources to make the difference to cut the cord and move forward. This must be our goal. 

We must now cultivate our only other visible and reliable resource, our human resources, to capture the way to move towards sustainable long-term viable growth and development

We now have the way. Let us find the means to broker a new Deal for our Sustainable Growth and Development for the generations to come.