Unequal trade with Caricom

MIRANDA LA ROSE Reporting from Guyana

THE principal beneficiary of the Caribbean Community’s trade and single market is Trinidad and Tobago which subsidises its service providers and manufacturing and transportation sectors with cheap energy prices, St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves says.

“How could you have a basic commodity like that in the process of production, subsidised? How do you expect us to compete,” he asked at a high-level stakeholder consultation on the Caribbean Single Market and the Economy last Friday at Providence in Guyana. Gonsalves said that from the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) standpoint “we are unequally yoked.”

SVG buys some EC$150 or US$60 million in goods from TT annually. “We have sold to them up to two years ago, EC$20 million mainly in agricultural products. That figure has fallen now to EC$10 million.” Both aggregate value and volume of the goods, he said, “have fallen significantly because we cannot get foreign exchange for our goods sold by small traders.”

He has raised the matter at the CARICOM Heads of Government conference and through TT’s central bank. “There is no solution. We pay Trinidad and Tobago in hard currency US$46 million for foreign currency controls.” Nevertheless, he said, “Our traders have to stand in the queue in the banks in Trinidad with Tom, Dick and Harry, Mary, Elizabeth and Sharon to get foreign exchange no doubt to buy among other things perfumes and cheeses.”

He continued, “But the gals that sell tannias, bananas and eddoes and the fruits, which they eat, they cannot get foreign exchange. So, my traders have a lot of TT dollars in the bank in Trinidad.” Traders take produce from farmers on credit, he said, and when the farmers need their money, they cannot get any because the TT dollars are not used in SVG.

“That simple fact impoverishes the rural areas in my country,” he complained. Promises have been made by the TT government to resolve the issue, he said, “but it is a long time in coming.” Barbados has an arrangement where the traders get the necessary documentation to go to the commercial bank to get their money.

The OECS countries and SVG have liabilities amounting to 17 per cent of the GDP as a consequence of the collapse of CL Financial and by fault the British American Insurance Company, a CL Financial subsidiary which operated in the islands, he said.

There is a species of persons on these islands, he calls “the gentile poor,” he said, because they placed their savings into the failed insurance giant and they have not been compensated.

The Patrick Manning government had paid out US$100, the Kamla Persaud-Bissessar government paid US$36 million and they cannot get the remaining US$64 million, from the current TT government, for reasons unknown.

It was painful to watch professionals who were independent from a strong middle-class background retire “in gentile poverty. That is a fact,” Gonsalves said.