COTED Chairman not fully satisfied after latest meeting

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, February 12, 2010 – CARICOM’s Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED) wrapped up its 29th Meeting earlier this week with some dissatisfaction with the progress made at the two-day forum.

COTED Chairman and Suriname’s Minister of Trade, Clifford Marica, reported that while he was happy that the majority of the 20-item agenda was dealt with expeditiously, he was concerned that there was little movement on some matters, including those related to Contingent Rights within the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME).

At the opening of COTED on Monday, Minister Marica had urged delegates to find practical and workable solutions to the matters before it. At its conclusion, he said he was not “100 percent satisfied.”

He was pleased with the deliberations related to the CARICOM-Canada negotiations for a Trade and Development Agreement, and pointed out that further rounds of negotiations are to be undertaken this year. The first round of negotiations was held last year.

Among the weighty agenda items before the region’s Trade Ministers were trade in goods which encompassed matters related to the Common External Tariff (CET). One area in which the meeting was very “fluent”, the Chairman said, related to the establishment of a mechanism for the suspension of the CET.

The suspension of the CET on the importation of cement was one of the items on which there were lengthy and robust discussions.

“Given the kind of issues we had on the agenda and given the way in which we dealt with them, I would say I am satisfied. I am not satisfied with the cement issue,” he said, even as he acknowledged that it was a difficult and sensitive matter.

High on the Meeting’s agenda was the consideration of a report on the status of implementation of the CSME. The report found that the Single Market was functioning but there were gaps in the legislative and institutional/infrastructural framework that needed to be addressed.

The meeting recorded little movement on Contingent Rights. While there was an appreciation for the critical importance of free movement of the factors of production to the functioning of the CSME, member states continued to cite capacity and resource constraints as the main reasons for their reservations on some of those rights.

They have agreed to complete their national consultations on Contingent Rights by September in order to apprise the COTED of their progress in October.

Among the other matters the Ministers dealt with were agriculture trade, development of the Services Sector, Information and Communication Technology for Development and the implementation of the EC-CARIFORUM Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA).