CARICOM to clamp down on breaches of rice monitoring mechanism
Stabroek News
June 30, 2004
The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is moving to tighten up on member states that import cheap, subsidised rice from external sources in breach of the Rice Monitoring Mechanism.
Guyana's rice industry would be put at risk if the situation is left unchecked, and this could be the same situation for other rice-producing Caricom states.
At a press briefing held on Friday in the boardroom of the Ministry of Agriculture, Head of the Agricultural Project Cycle Unit of the Ministry of Agriculture, Cecil Seepersaud said that since the establishment of the mechanism, only some states have provided information on their production, export and import data every six months. But he said that although this is happening, some of the reports received were found to have inaccuracies.
Seepersaud accompanied Minister of Fisheries, Other Crops and Livestock Satyadeow Sawh, who is also the acting Minister of Agriculture, to the 17th Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED) meeting held in Trinidad and Tobago on June 16. Rajdai Jagarnauth, Senior Foreign Trade Officer of the Ministry of Foreign Trade and International Cooperation (MOFTIC) also accompanied Sawh to the meeting.
Two years ago, COTED agreed to the Rice Monitoring Mechanism and it obligates member states to provide data on production, imports and exports to the Caricom Secretariat on a six-month basis. The Secretariat is then expected to collate and analyse the information and feed it back to participating member states and the Council to inform policy decisions. This collation of information is also important for the purposes of matching Caricom's rice needs with the production of member states.
According to Seepersaud, the Council has received reports from Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and St Vincent and the Grenadines. These reports, he said, were presented at the meeting after the Secretariat had analysed them.
He said too that the analysis found that because St Vincent has a packaging plant it needed to import rice from external sources to supplement its stock.
St Vincent, he said, would usually apply for a waiver of the Common External Tariff (CET) when making such imports. "We saw that [recently] they were not applying for the waiver and we raised this at the COTED meeting," he said.
He said that there was some amount of discussion on the matter of rice from external sources and the Council agreed that there were some loopholes to be addressed in this area.
Rice miller and farmer Beni Sankar had told Stabroek News that if the monitoring mechanism did not work, people would not want to invest money in the regional rice industry. He had said too that COTED needed to do more than just urge the member states to play by the agreed rules. Sankar even went as far as to suggest that Guyana find its fortunes outside of Caricom and look to markets in South America.
Minister of Foreign Trade and International Cooperation, Clement Rohee had said that although he disagreed with the notion that Caricom is a "waste of time", there was some deception on the part of some of the member states. This he cited as the reason some of the states were not forthcoming with their reports to the Council.
At the last meeting of the Council, Caricom Secretary-General Edwin Carrington assured that the secretariat would have been going after the delinquent states to get them to provide the information to the Council within a specified time frame. Carrington had said, however, that the Caricom Secretariat could only act if it receives the data from member states.
Meanwhile, the meeting also looked at the state of readiness of port facilities in Caricom member states in relation to the impending International Ship and Port Facility Security Code (ISPS). This code comes into effect tomorrow and according to Jagarnauth, almost all of the member states seem not to be "up to scratch" for the deadline.
She said that the matter was one of critical concern and the Council had urged its members to put the necessary measures in place to ensure compliance by the deadline. She said too that there has been no indication that the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) would extend the deadline for compliance.
Non-compliance with the code would mean that ships and port facilities would not be able to interface with certified counterparts and that could result in heavy penalties and delays in cargo delivery.
This would have extreme consequences on the region's agriculture, since ships are used to transport most goods.
Seepersaud told reporters that the issue of Trinidad importing poultry from Guyana was raised at the meeting and as a result, a team from that country would be coming to Guyana in a few weeks to ensure that this country has the standard that Trinidad requires.
For this the Trinidad personnel would have to inspect the operations and processes used in Guyana's poultry industry.
He said that for some time Trinidad had expressed reservation on the import of Guyana's poultry, which is approved by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The minister gave the assurance of Guyana's readiness to export to Trinidad and Tobago and decried that country's attempts to have Guyana removed as a poultry exporter to the twin-island republic.
The COTED meeting also decided that Suriname should remove the tax levied on the export of logs to Guyana, since both countries are members of Caricom.
Jagarnauth said that during past Council meetings, Guyana reported this issue of the tax on the Suriname logs. She said that Suriname said at the COTED meeting that it intends to address the issue by putting laws in place to remove the tax.
But according to her, the Suriname officials said that they know that logs exported to Guyana are being re-exported. The COTED meeting reportedly asked Suriname to provide the evidence that logs exported to Guyana are being re-exported.
The meeting also discussed the state of sugar in the region and the alternatives for enhancing the industry.