Officially, World Customs Day is tomorrow, but since that's a Saturday the Belize Customs and Excise Department showcased their work to the public today. The department displayed the various aspects of the job of a customs officer and the important work they do to maintain domestic stability. The slogan for this year's customs' celebration is SMART borders for Seamless Trade, Travel and Transport. We spoke to one of Custom's head strategists about how they plan to turn this year's theme into a reality...
Therese Martinez - Strategic Policy and Trade Unit
"The theme for this year is smart borders for seamless trade, travel and transport. The objective is for Customs as a lead agency, a border agency and an agency that is at the front line at the border to be able to facilitate trade. The movement of goods, the movement of people and the movement of transport conveyances. And so the theme brings to us the need for us to make trade, travel and transport movement seamless. In other words we must be able to find approaches that will allow that to happen for it to bring about low cost traders and for us to facilitate trade. So the theme focuses on securing borders and for us to also measure performance in terms of the release time of goods and people travelling, and also for us to utilize automation to solve these issue where we're able then to move goods, move people faster and for us to also look at risk based management to secure the trade, to secure the movement of people and also to use the technology. Leverage information technology to solve some of these issues that would be able to make the facilitation occur."
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