Barbados and other CARIFORUM member states must take responsibility for how the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) has gone, says Minister of Energy, Small Business and Entrepreneurship Kerrie Symmonds.
At the same time, Symmonds said it was about time that more opportunities were created for entrepreneurs and skilled nationals.
“I think it is time for us to look at bringing more sharply into focus the issue of building out a cadre of skilled nationals . . . It is time to take the knee off the neck of opportunity,” said Symmonds.
He was outlining a number of challenges to be removed and opportunities to be created or enhanced for economic development and resilience in Barbados and the rest of the Caribbean.
Pointing to a 2017 Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) study which highlighted that between 30 and 40 per cent of the Barbados GDP came from informal activity between 2000 and 2010, Symmonds said the challenge was making those businesses formal.
“There is not a shortfall of entrepreneurial interest, there is not a shortfall in commercial interest and marketable talent, but where we do have the shortfall is in our ability to make the informal entities operate in a more formal way within the socioeconomic system of Barbados,” he said.
“It is important as we look at development for us to focus on the existing avenues of opportunities which have not been brought fully to bear to the widest possible cross section of people,” said Symmonds.
He singled out the National Vocational Qualification (NVQ) as one of the areas for the expansion of opportunity for skilled nationals, stating that Barbados still had a lot of work to do with regard to making sure that the access to NVQ is brought to the widest possible cross section of the public.
“It has to be decentralized and brought into the communities for ease of access and convenience,” said Symmonds.
“There is a need for us to also recognize that we have to move people from being engaging in simple routine work activities under supervision, to a level where they are managerial and entrepreneurial and are able to deal with complex issues and have personal accountability for design, planning, execution and evaluation of the work functions they do,” he said.
“Once we are bringing into sharp focus the need for us to expand opportunity through training, equally we have to take the knee off the neck of opportunity in the context of professional services that we are supposed to be exporting,” he added.
He argued that one of the impediments to the export of professional services in Barbados and the English-speaking Caribbean was that we have not hammered out mutual recognition agreements so that we can use the French and Dutch Antilles, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean as avenues of opportunity for our service supplies at the professional level.
“It is an opportunity we have lost because we were supposed to see this come out of the Economic Partnership Agreement which was signed as far back as 2008. It is a source of concern and has to be fixed,” he said, adding that he was “a little disappointed” about the way in which the process of the EPA unfolded.
“We have to take some responsibility. The first area I think is the mutual recognition agreement because we did not need anybody to help us build out those recognition agreements even among ourselves,” said Symmonds.
The EPA was put in place in October 2008 to make it easier for the people of the 15-member CARIFORUM bloc and the EU member states to invest and trade goods and services with each other.
Another challenge which Symmonds said needed to be confronted “robustly” was the issue of standards. He noted that it was impossible for local and regional producers of goods and services to penetrate global markets if they did not meet stipulated standards.
Symmonds said it was a “headache” for him that of the estimated 10,000 businesses in Barbados, only about 100 of them could be identified as clients of the Barbados National Standards Institution (BNSI).
“So there needs to be a national re-awakening on the issue of having a quality infrastructure built around standards and the delivery of standards at international best practices,” he said.
While tourism was “here to stay”, he added, the time had come to do those things which we knew we had to do, while diversifying the Barbados economy into other areas including renewable energy, transportation and the digital sector, to create “a menu of options” at the disposal of young Barbadians.
Symmonds was a panelist on the Barbados Coalition of Service Industries (BCSI) Fish Bowl Conversation series on Wednesday, under the theme Services for Economic Resilience and Post-Pandemic Recovery. (marlonmadden@barbadostoday.bb)
