UN General Assembly
1998

in 1997 bypassed our countries in the Caribbean region. At the centre of international integrated investment flows, “are large international and transnational corporations and their affiliates whose global sales volume was estimated to have reached some $7 trillion in 1995”. This poses the question of how our agri-based and export-oriented economies cope with or even attempt to compete against giant transnational institutions in an era in which international production has now become more important than exports in terms of the delivery of goods and services to foreign markets. Foreign direct investment, as I have come to understand it, integrates markets through intra-business activities and the production systems of countries. Therefore, our economies cannot participate in this huge and rapidly growing production system because we have not been given necessary technical, technological and material support to move into the centre of the global market place through its main vehicle — that is, production. To make matters worse, we have not been allowed opportunities to gain appropriate access to those critical markets, whereas foreign businesses based in those