Weekly Report - 29 April 2010 (WR-10-17)

REGION | Energy. The US is preparing to combat the soft diplomacy of Venezuela's President Hugo Chávez in the Caribbean. Venezuela provides preferential oil prices to the sub-region under its Petrocaribe initiative, but at a recent meeting of the Energy and Climate Partnership of the Americas (ECPA), the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, said that the US would help the Caribbean lessen its dependence on foreign oil. She described it as “shameful" that despite its proximity to countries with vast crude oil reserves, the Caribbean had some of the highest electricity rates in the world and pledged a US grant (of an unspecified amount) to the Organization of American States (OAS) to lend technical and legal expertise to “any Caribbean country seeking to help get clean energy projects off the ground". She added that the OAS, the Caribbean energy ministers, the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and officials from Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands were exploring the possibility of installing undersea electric cables in the region to give the Caribbean access to new power supplies.

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