Local businesses move to boost trade with CARICOM

Business leaders in Barbados have highlighted a range of issues that continue to hamper trade with other Caribbean Community (CARICOM) states and made several recommendations they believe could help turn things around.

Addressing a Barbados Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI) virtual trade forum last Friday, several officials representing private sector interests pointed to the high cost of doing business, slow processes within customs departments and a lack of an enabling environment, as major setbacks to increasing trade between Barbados and Suriname and Guyana.

Louis Forde, Customs, Port and International Trade Advisor with the Barbados Private Sector Association, said in order to improve trade between Bridgetown and its two CARICOM neighbours, Government must make a greater effort in the area of business facilitation.

Additionally, Forde said customs departments need to remove repetitive procedures, explaining that once a container of items was inspected in one jurisdiction prior to being shipped and a certificate was issued, there was no need for a second inspection of the same items once they reached their destination.

“It would mean that trading now between Suriname and Guyana, and hopefully the wider CARICOM, is much more efficient and faster than trading with England, Germany or the US,” said Forde, who also called for the import/export process to be fully digitized.

“The customs seem to target goods that are CARICOM oriented or being exported to CARICOM because of the duty-free nature. I exported a lot over the COVID period and whenever my documents say ‘made in CARICOM’ I got held up a bit longer. We need to fix the fact that it takes a bit more to trade within our region than it seems to trade outside the region,” he added at the online forum that examined the topic Expanding Trade Between Barbados, Guyana and Suriname: Identifying Challenges and Opportunities.

Senior Vice President of the BCCI, James Clarke reported that Barbados enjoyed a “surplus” in merchandise trade with Guyana, exporting $59 million in goods in 2019 while importing $19 million in goods from the South American country in that same year.

He also noted that Bridgetown generally had a trade deficit with Suriname though annual goods export increased in 2019 to reach $11 million. There was a decline in export to and import from Suriname last year, reaching $4.5 million and $9.9 million, respectively.

General Manager at C.O. Williams Construction Ltd. Neil Weekes complained that the biggest challenge his company has been facing for many years in getting items into Suriname, Guyana and other CARICOM nations was the cost of doing business.

He recommended that a “designated bulk facility” be set up in Barbados through which companies can increase their exports. This, said Weekes, would make companies in Barbados more competitive than those in other jurisdictions that were also exporting in bulk at a cheaper rate.

Meanwhile, Chief Executive Officer of the Barbados Agricultural Society (BAS) James Paul told the seminar that he wanted to see greater cooperation among exporters so they did not all compete in the same areas.

Paul also recommended the establishment of a business platform mechanism to link markets with regional producers

“I think sometimes that is the core of the problem – the fact that we cannot cooperate with one another in terms of the production of commodities and identifying where the gaps exist in the supply of commodities between one country against another,” he explained.

“How can the activities in one country complement the activities in another country? I think that is something, if we can actually address at a very early stage, we can facilitate greater trade between the countries,” added Paul.

He also pointed to the need for better regional transportation links to facilitate trade of some commodities including grains, which he said were becoming too expensive to import from further afield.

Pointing out that the region needed to ramp up production in this area to mitigate against international price instability, Paul said “there needs to be a serious investment in capacity building in helping, let’s say, Guyana and Suriname to do it”.

Meanwhile, Executive Director of the Barbados Coalition of Services Industry Graham Clarke also pointed to the need for a better enabling environment to increase trade in services across the region’s borders.

Lalu Vaswani, Chairman of the BCCI Customs and Trade Facilitation Committee and Tripartite Sub-Committee, gave the assurance that work was ongoing to improve business facilitation in the area of trade.

“The Barbados Chamber of Commerce and Industry has been engaging our Barbados Customs and Excise Department and we are discussing a webinar to be held very shortly to look at how we can promote a trusted trader programme that has already been piloted for 12 to 15 months and how to expand it to the rest of the business community.

“In addition to that, there will be a new feature called pre-clearance of cargo where you can have your customs declarations processed prior to the arrival of shipments, and we hope that a similar situation could be reciprocated in both Guyana and Suriname with that kind of discussion,” Vaswani said, adding that further digitalization was necessary in all CARICOM markets. (marlonmadden@barbadostoday.bb)