UNITED NATIONS, June 24 (Xinhua) -- Belize, Caribbean countries on Wednesday called for specific arrangements for the flow of resources to developing countries in order to help them out of the current global and economic crisis.

    The statement came as Dean O. Barrow, prime minister and finance minister of Belize, was speaking at the high-level UN conference on world financial and economic crisis and its impact on development on behalf of the Caribbean community.

    "If further devastation in our developing countries is to be averted, specific arrangements for the flow of resources to our governments, whether by way of grants or soft loans, need to be put in place immediately," he said. "There is simply no more time."

    "It is also very important to note that in our corner of the world the crisis seems to be proceeding entirely unabated," he said. "There will be nearly reversal to compensate for the blinding speed with which the contagion moved from developed to developing world."

    "Thus for us, commodity prices remain severely depressed, accompanied naturally by prolonged decline in export earnings from agriculture," he said. "There is also a continuum in the contraction of tourism revenues, with the attendant myriad job losses and business closures."

    "Foreign direct investment is in retreat, on the run, resulting in biting retrenchment especially in the construction sector," he said.

    "My purpose today, however, is not merely to rehearse the facts of the financial and economic crisis," he said. "We are here to find answers."

    "And in that search I believe we need to address two issues above all: first what must be done generally to mitigate the effects of the crisis in developing countries, and second, what arrangements we need to put in place to make sure that a crisis like this does not recur."

    "We need to face some structural realities," he said. "The immediate one is that small, open, trade-dependent economies cannot, from their own resources, implement back-in-vogue Keynesian stimulus package," he said.

    "Since the crisis was not of our making, and given the structural concerns," he said. "The first thing that we want is for developed countries urgently to reassess and restructure their bilateral assistance programs to developing countries."