Mexico-Caricom summit pledges fight against crime, climate change
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The inaugural summit between Mexico and the Caribbean Community (Caricom) concluded on Sunday with participants pledging further efforts to fight organized crime and redress climate change.
Participants also agreed to have their next summit in two years in Barbados.
"We have agreed to implement a mechanism that shows what all the nations in the region are doing to fight organized crime," Mexican President Felipe Calderon told the closing session.
Participants have also agreed to work more closely to fight climate change, the president added.
"We are aware of the need to revert the negative effects of climate change and the need to join forces to do so," Calderon said.
Dominican Prime Minister Roosevelt Skerrit demanded that the international community make good its promise to help poorer countries cope with effects of climate change.
"At the Conference of the Parties (COP) we want to see a fund that can make the remedial measures needed concrete," Skerrit said.
Mexico will host the 16th COP in November and the country is a key promoter of a 10-billion-U.S.-dollar fund to facilitate remedial measures in less developed countries.
The Dominican prime minister also expressed the region's solidarity with Haiti.
"As leaders, all of us have been tested to various degrees at one time or another, but none of us have been tested in the way that (Haitian President Rene) Preval has been."
Haiti was hit by a magnitude-7.3 earthquake on Jan. 12. The Haitian president projected an estimated quake death toll of over 300,000 people at the beginning of the summit.
Another 1.5 million Haitians are now living in streets and are at risk of rain-caused diseases as the Caribbean island state has its main rainy season starting in April.
The Mexico-Caricom Summit ran alongside a Rio Group summit and a Unity Summit -- a Rio Group-Caricom summit, which are still under way in the Mexican resort town of Playa del Carmen on the Caribbean coast.
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