The Trinidad and Tobago Manufacturers Association (TTMA) wants the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Single Market and Economy (CSME) to be “fixed” as it laments the ongoing problems surrounding intra-regional trade.
The CSME allows for the free movement of goods, skills, labor and skills across the 15-member grouping, and the TTMA chief executive officer, said that the initiative should be fixed.
“Let’s fix the rules, the terms of engagement, the trading relationship so anybody wants to trade the way it’s supposed to…,” he said.
Ramdeen, who is part of a TTMA trade delegation told a “Welcome to Guyana” event, that his organization has been making representation to the Caribbean Private Sector Organisation in an effort to have the situation addressed.
Ramdeen said that non-tariff barriers were hampering imports of agricultural produce from Guyana and called on the political directorate to clear the hurdles.
“Our import is six billion Trinidad and Tobago dollars (One TT dollar=US$0.16 cents) and Guyana is professing it can feed the entire region. There is also Belize and Suriname they have the (land) mass to do it…
“Why can’t we source the tomatoes from [Guyana] to make the tomato paste? It is not that the private sector in Trinidad don’t want it to come to Trinidad. The political directorate needs to get these things right,”
“We need the political directorate to get these things right for us and all the talking at that level to say whatever is happening to hamper trade; just get it right, Create the environment for us and Guyanese businessmen will prosper, Trinidad businessmen will prosper in the non-energy sector and once we are starting to talk about food, it wouldn’t start and end there,” he said.
The TTMA trade mission includes 21 manufacturers, comprising the food and beverage, printing and packaging, chemicals and construction sectors and Ramdeen said that CARICOM was stifling the production of certain products that have been already certified by authorities in North America and Europe.
“We do it already. Most of my manufacturers in Trinidad and Tobago….we produce and export to the international arena. We supply our products to the United States and Europe and if we are meeting those standards, we can meet any standards throughout the Caribbean but we need the rules for the Caribbean to be fixed,” he said.
He said while Trinidad and Tobago was buying a lot of its food from outside the Caribbean, regional trade was facing the perennial humbug of sanitary and phytosanitary measures, adding “these are the things they need to discuss, and let’s resolve those issues so the trade could flow”.
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