The European Union has opened its markets to Caribbean goods and services.
It is the EU-CARICOM Economic Partnership Agreement or EPA and for the next
two days – Belizean stakeholders are learning how to take advantage of
the opportunity. Ramesh Chaitoo who is the head of the Services Trade Unit at
the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery is facilitating the workshop. He
says Belizean businesses and investors need to act now because they are running
out of time.
Ramesh Chaitoo, CRNM
“The idea is to take the meeting or the participants through the main
provisions in the EPA, the Economic Partnership Agreement, and in terms of services
and investment, look at the market access that is granted and talk about on
the one hand for the private sector what they need to do to organize themselves
to take advantage of that.”
Nancy Namis, Foreign Trade Directorate
“We are trying to let the private sector in particular become more
aware of the services and investment provisions within that Economic Partnership
Agreement. It is very important for people in the private sector, especially
those service providers, to become familiar with the various provisions so that
they are able to take advantage of the opportunity that we are now presented
with.”
Ramesh Chaitoo,
“We will do the overview of the provisions and then look specifically
at tourism and creative industries, look at development support and financing
mechanisms for firms in general and some EPA implementation issues and then
hopefully we’ll have some interesting feedback from the stakeholders who
I hope show up because the intent here was to find out what their needs are
with an aim of helping Belize develop an Aide for Trade Strategy for services
because in the final analysis eventually the Europeans are signing agreements
with other countries, or they are negotiating, and the window the Caribbean
has I would say is three to five years in terms of getting their foot in and
services, as a sector, as a part of the economic activity is after all in the
relationship so we think it is important to start to position people to do business
with the Europeans. It is a huge market.”
The session continues tomorrow. It starts at 8:30 at the Biltmore and
it is open to the public.
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