PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

Now is the time to in­vest in Ja­maica.

This was the pitch made by Ja­maica’s Min­is­ter of In­dus­try, In­vest­ment and Com­merce, Sen­a­tor Aubyn Hill to in­vestors from T&T at the Hy­att Re­gency yes­ter­day.

Hill was speak­ing at a trade mis­sion host­ed by the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ja­maica Pro­mo­tions Cor­po­ra­tion (JAM­PRO).

“This is the right time. Why is it the right time? We went through the hard­ships in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and we’ve weath­ered the storm un­der Prime Min­is­ter An­drew Hol­ness and his Cab­i­net which I am very priv­i­leged to serve, we have done some things that have made Ja­maica quite out­stand­ing, said Hill, who stat­ed that Ja­maica had seen sig­nif­i­cant eco­nom­ic growth fol­low­ing the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

“We have done well and very well. Very well is com­par­a­tive, be­cause com­ing out of the pan­dem­ic, there is no oth­er coun­try in the Caribbean, in fact I dare say in the re­gion, in the hemi­sphere ex­cept for Guyana that has grown at the rate that Ja­maica has grown in the last year,” said Hill.

Hill said the coun­try had done a ma­jor turn­around fol­low­ing the hard­ships which led them to turn to the In­ter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund in 2013, three years af­ter a pre­vi­ous sub­scrip­tion to the fund went awry.

He point­ed out that un­der this pro­gramme, Ja­maica’s re­formed econ­o­my has be­come the poster child for IMF.

“We don’t want that ho­n­our again. I’ll tell you why we don’t want it, but it’s very rare that you have an out­go­ing head of the IMF prais­ing Ja­maica for be­ing a poster child and the in­com­ing (Kristali­na) Georgie­va say­ing it’s a poster child now we don’t want to be back there be­cause you have to be bad to be cred­it­ed for be­ing fixed. And you have to be work­ing ex­treme­ly hard com­ing from bad to be cred­it­ed by the new IMF head but we take it be­cause very few peo­ple can be in that po­si­tion be­cause they sink and then they nev­er come out,” said Hill.

Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon ac­knowl­edged Ja­maica as a ma­jor trad­ing part­ner for this coun­try.

She said, “In 2022, Ja­maica was T&T’s third largest trad­ing part­ner in Cari­com and that’s en­er­gy and non-en­er­gy trade. In that same year, both coun­tries trad­ed just over $1.2 bil­lion worth of prod­ucts with each oth­er. T&T im­ports a wide range of prod­ucts from Ja­maica such as grape wine, iron con­tain­ers, flour, and con­densed milk more re­cent­ly”

She ex­plained that there were ar­eas how­ev­er where trade could be im­proved.

“There are ad­di­tion­al sec­tors that are open for busi­ness for in­vestors from Ja­maica and these are the sports and cre­ative sec­tors. And this is on both sides, in­vestors on both sides,” said Gopee-Scoon.

“Ser­vices is an­oth­er im­por­tant sec­tor that we are de­sirous of im­prov­ing trade with our part­ners in Ja­maica.  In that re­gard, the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try has part­nered with the T&T Coali­tion of Ser­vices In­dus­tries (TTC­SI) to de­vel­op a num­ber of ini­tia­tives and this is go­ing to help us ex­pand our trade in ser­vices,” she said.