In his keynote address upon the opening of the conference, President Leonel Fernandez spoke of the need to be cautious and to rethink the future. He cautioned about the transfer of speculative capitals, which could be very harmful for the economies of the Caribbean. He also said that the Caribbean nations are not obliged to take as dogma the theories elaborated in the think tank centers of industrialized nations, as these are not necessarily adapted to the Caribbean reality. He spoke of how the times have changed and that nation can no base their generation of wealth on commodities and the export of raw materials whose sales prices have declined by more than 40%. He mentioned the depressed prices of petroleum of Venezuela and Mexico, the Central American and Caribbean banana and the Cuban and Dominican crude sugar, as examples. He stressed that the region has moved on to export services, with advances in tourism, telecommunications, industrial free zones and financial services. He fostered further development in microelectronics, biotechnology and informatics as part of a knowledge-based growth strategy. "To advance within a global economy, it is of high interest to attract investments that permit a transfer of technology and promote innovative projects that truly increase the capacity of our companies and raise the quality of life of our workers," he said.
