Strides made to reduce region’s food imports

The regional private sector organisation that was approved by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to help drive the full implementation of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) is reporting progress in several areas.

Chief Executive Officer and Technical Director of the CARICOM Private Sector Organisation (CPSO) Dr Patrick Antoine said significant efforts were being made in driving down the region’s food import bill and establishing a regional stock exchange.

Ahead of closed door deliberations with government officials in Bridgetown on Thursday, Antoine told members of the media that the CPSO had been working closely with stakeholders to ramp up agriculture production in an effort to reduce the region’s high food import bill.

“We assembled our resources and the CPSO, I think, brought to the table the analysis of how the value chain could work to enable what is now 19 agri-food opportunities being built out in our community,” he reported. 

“We have begun this work and again in building the structure, we were able to recognise the importance of working jointly with the public sector,” he said, noting that work was ongoing with the CARICOM Ministerial Taskforce on Food Production and Food Security.

He said working with the various ministers of agriculture and trade across CARICOM had allowed the group to reach some important “landmarks” in reducing the good import bill.

“What we have done is we have asked the countries to build out for us what their own programmes would look like and we have been benchmarked against that,” he explained.

In early 2020 Heads of Government of CARICOM committed to reducing the approximately US$5 billion annual food import bill in the region by at least 25 per cent by 2025 with help from the private sector.

Since then, several countries in the 15-member CARICOM bloc have been putting specific measures in place under the CARICOM Agri-Food System Strategy to work towards this goal.

According to recent reports from CARICOM, the region has so far been able to achieve just about 57 per cent of the food import reduction target by ramping up production in several areas including cocoa, dairy, meat and poultry, root crops and fruit.

Antoine also gave the assurance that work has started towards the implementation of the much talked about regional stock exchange. He noted, however, that several stumbling blocks within countries have been hindering progress.

“This is important because as we talk about enabling capital and finance market integration, the absence of an integrated stock exchange or what we call finance and capital market integration instruments, has been a bugbear,” he said.

“Very early it occurred to us that even if we were talking about bringing onboard the immense capacity of resources of the credit unions and of the insurance funds, that in every single country there were these impediments to having them participate in investment products in other parts of our community. So this has been a focus,” he said.

At the same time, Antoine said the CPSO was also pushing for the establishment of a single company registry in the region, that would allow a company to register in one jurisdiction and be able to automatically operate in another without having to go through a separate registration process in a subsequent jurisdiction.

The CPSO was approved at the 40th Regular Meeting of the Conference of the Heads of Government in St Lucia in July 2019. In 2020, it was recognised as an associate institution of the regional bloc.

The Barbados-headquartered CPSO is made up of the region’s major private sector business leaders, primarily from the conglomerates.

Antoine gave the assurance that players in the micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSME) sector were being “incorporated” in the work  of the CPSO, noting that special mechanisms were in place to ensure their participation.

“It is also the case that we have created some special mechanisms quite early which we represented in our initial proposals to heads such as the strategic project investment facility which is aimed specifically at micro and small enterprises,” he added.

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade Kerrie Symmonds said Thursday’s deliberations were to further discuss the way forward for the roll-out of various aspects of the CSME and a greater role which the private sector could play in that regard.

Pointing to significantly high prices that some industries were facing, Symmonds said: “The role of the private sector organisation has got to be about helping the different governments of this region to treat to some of these matters with a view to making sure that businesses both large and small are going to be at the centrepiece of their attention.” (MM)