Dix­ie-Ann Dick­son

Trade and In­dus­try Min­is­ter Stephen Cadiz says T&T will be mov­ing from the tra­di­tion­al mar­kets of Cari­com to a mar­ket of 70 mil­lion peo­ple in South and Cen­tral Amer­i­ca. He said last Mon­day's Pana­ma Par­tial Scope Agree­ment was just the be­gin­ning of the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor's in­cur­sion in­to that 70 mil­lion mar­ket.

Last week, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar led a lo­cal, high-lev­el del­e­ga­tion, which in­clud­ed Cadiz, For­eign Min­is­ter Su­ru­jrat­tan Ram­bachan and En­er­gy Min­is­ter Kevin Ram­nar­ine to Pana­ma where the agree­ment be­tween T&T and Pana­ma was signed. Ram­bachan and Pana­ma's vice pres­i­dent and chief trade ne­go­tia­tor, Di­ana Salazar, signed the Par­tial Scope Trade Agree­ment, which has been ne­go­ti­at­ed over six months.

Speak­ing at the launch of the Trade and In­vest­ment Con­ven­tion at the Hy­att on Fri­day, Cadiz ex­plained that agree­ment main­ly per­tained to goods with T&T would have ac­cess to 177 prod­ucts made in Pana­ma. "T&T could now ship to Pana­ma," he said. He said even though it is go­ing to take more time, T&T is look­ing at tap­ping in­to Pana­ma's ser­vice sec­tor.

"Pana­ma has a huge ser­vices sec­tor, so we are go­ing to be work­ing on de­vel­op­ing that part of the agree­ment soon to in­clude ser­vices." In an ef­fort to ex­pand T&T's mar­ket trade, Cadiz said the Gov­ern­ment is ag­gres­sive­ly pur­su­ing sev­er­al trade agree­ments with Cen­tral and South Amer­i­ca. As ear­ly as April 11, Cadiz said Gov­ern­ment will be ini­ti­at­ing dis­cus­sions for par­tial scope agree­ments with Guatemala fol­lowed by El Sal­vador.

This could gen­er­ate 40 mil­lion ad­di­tion­al cus­tomers to T&T, Cadiz said. "Cari­com now is rough­ly five mil­lion peo­ple and Cen­tral Amer­i­ca is 40 mil­lion. The non-Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean coun­tries, such as Cu­ba, Haiti, the Do­mini­can Re­pub­lic, the French is­lands, the Dutch is­lands, rep­re­sent a mar­ket just short of 70 mil­lion.

"There­fore, in about two years, we are go­ing to be mov­ing from a tra­di­tion­al mar­ket of Cari­com to a mar­ket of 70 mil­lion peo­ple and this would on­ly au­gur well for goods and ser­vices pro­vid­ed." Cadiz said even though the Gov­ern­ment has been crit­i­cised for its over­seas trips, it has in fact raised the coun­try's pro­file dur­ing these mis­sions.

"We have to go out there and pound the pave­ment," he said. Mean­while, he said Ram­bachan is work­ing on es­tab­lish­ing a T&T em­bassy in Bei­jing, Chi­na, to fa­cil­i­tate trade re­la­tion­ships and bet­ter com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Japan is show­ing in­vest­ment in­ter­est in T&T, he said.