Caribbean nations have called on the US to end its trade embargo on Venezuela to allow them access to the neighboring country’s oil.
The 15-member Caribbean Community (Caricom) “urged the removal of sanctions on Venezuela to allow the countries of the Region to benefit from the PetroCaribe initiative and for further progress in the exploration of transboundary natural gas deposits between Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela,” according to a statement for the group’s meeting last week.
A US delegation led by Secretary of State Anthony Blinken attended the meeting in Trinidad and Tobago’s capital, Port of Spain.
PetroCaribe is an agreement initiated by Venezuela and launched in 2005 under which it supplies oil and petroleum products to Caribbean states at reduced prices. It allows buyer countries to buy oil with an upfront payment at market value, but with 25-year financing for the remaining installments at one percent interest if oil market prices exceed an agreed threshold.
Oil trading under PetroCaribe had been suspended in 2018 due to declining Venezuelan production, US political pressure on Venezuela and recipient countries and weaker global oil and gas prices, according to business group Caribbean Council. Caracas has been reactivating the offer under the pact with partner governments. One of the latest relaunch deals was reached in Belize, according to Venezuelan government-backed broadcaster teleSUR on November 25, 2022.
Meanwhile, Washington had already said it would not block the development of the Dragon gas field on the border between Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago. The Department of State confirmed on June 30 the issuance of a license by the Treasury to the government of Port of Spain for the Venezuelan field.
“We took this step to support the ability of the Government of Trinidad and Tobago to access additional natural gas resources and use existing onshore infrastructure to meet domestic demand and increase regional and global LNG exports. [liquefied natural gas]ammonia, urea and other gas-derived products, particularly in light of our commitment to assist the wider Caribbean region with access to additional energy supplies,” the department said in a press release.
In a speech to the US delegation at the assembly last week, Caricom President Roosevelt Skerrit praised the efforts of both sides to open economic cooperation between Caricom and the US. But he noted that “blacklisting, correspondent banking and access to concessional finance based on vulnerability are still a long way from resolution.”
“We need to see some movement in these areas if we are to achieve the required results,” Dominica’s prime minister Skerrit said, according to a Caricom transcript.
Meanwhile, Blinken focused on climate cooperation in his speech, saying, “… we seek to build greater resilience and adaptation to climate change, while accelerating the region’s transition to clean energy.”
“That’s the driving focus between the partnership we established, the US-Caribbean Partnership to Address the 2030 Climate Crisis, a program we launched last year to try to make energy systems cleaner, more resilient and more affordable, such as geothermal projects in Dominica and Saint Kitts and Nevis, solar microgrids in Saint Lucia, electric vehicles in Barbados and Jamaica and Suriname, just to name a few,” he said, according to a Caricom transcript. With the additional $20 million in climate funding that Vice President Harris announced last month in the Bahamas, we will continue to build on these efforts together.”
Blinken did not address US sanctions on Venezuela in his speech.
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