-President Ali tells CBU 57th AGA
President Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali has challenged Caribbean media professionals to stop treating global platforms as threats to be resisted and to start using them to bring the region’s own stories to the world.
He made the remarks while delivering the keynote address at the opening of the Caribbean Broadcasting Union’s 57th Annual General Assembly (AGA) at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre (ACCC) on Tuesday evening.
President Ali said the instinct to retreat from platforms like YouTube, TikTok and Netflix, in response to the flood of foreign content reaching Caribbean audiences, gets the strategy backwards.
“The answer to globalisation is not cultural isolation. It is cultural confidence,” President Ali said.
He pointed to sold-out international shows by West Indian artistes as proof the region already has content the world wants.
The unresolved question, he said, is whether Caribbean broadcasters are the ones putting it there.
“We have a product. Are we leveraging the product? We have a culture. Are we leveraging the culture? And if we don’t do it, trust me, someone will come in and show us how to do it,” President Ali said.
He traced the stakes back to why the CBU was founded in 1970: to ensure Caribbean people saw their own lives, language, and music reflected in the media, rather than leaving that job to outsiders.
That mission, he said, has grown more urgent, not less, now that “everybody transmits, everybody receives, everybody comments, everybody becomes, potentially, a publisher.”
President Ali argued the region’s advantage was never the size of its market but the distinctiveness of its identity and said broadcasters should measure success by how much Caribbean content reaches the world; not just how much foreign content reaches the Caribbean.
He tied the point back to his call for investment in people over equipment, arguing that skilled Caribbean producers and journalists, not the platforms themselves, will determine whether the region controls how its own story gets told.
President Ali closed by asking how history will judge this generation of broadcasters: whether they let Caribbean identity dissolve into global algorithms or used the moment to project it further than before.
“I believe we can choose the second,” he argued.
Also attending the ceremony were Prime Minister Brigadier (Ret’d) Mark Phillips, Minister in the Office of the Prime Minister, Kwame McCoy, President of the CBU, Anthony Greene, members of the diplomatic community and media professionals from around the region.
The 57th CBU AGA takes place from August 17-19 under the theme “Caribbean Media & AI”, bringing some key players in media, communications, and technology from across the English, Latin, and Spanish-speaking Caribbean for three days of networking, knowledge-sharing, and celebration.
This is the first time in more than a decade that Guyana has hosted the CBU’s AGA.