Chang
Adressing the U-Drive Association recently, President of the Jamaica Chamber of Commerce, Anthony Change, gave his thoughts on the contentious issue of United States trade barriers and U.S./Jamaica export relations. Here are the main essence of that speech
IN RECENT times, there have been much public discussions about United States/Jamaica relations and in particularly our trade relations, the new U.S, Farm Bill and comments made by U.S. Ambassador Sue Cobb.
Headlines such as 'A revival of the ugly American' have been common.
I sincerely believe we need to be rational and not emotional with this issue.
For sure the introduction of the U.S. steel safeguards and the new Farm Bill can be read by many as an unfortunate signal at this time. Considering we are now entering the final discussions on Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) and have recently concluded the Doha World Trade Organisation (WTO )meetings.
The timing has added fuel to the arguments of the sceptics and opponents of the FTAA, the promised regional trading bloc of this hemisphere
So the timing and signal sent by these two U.S. policy decisions is indeed awkward
We need to ask ourselves --what is the real impact of the U.S. Farm Bill on the Jamaican economy?
One commentator in a daily newspaper said that, in regards to the U.S. Farm Bill: "it is economies like Jamaica, that will feel the brunt".
Narrow range of commodities
The U.S. Farm Bill covers a narrow range of commodities like cotton, rice, wheat, grains, sugar and dairy.
Items which we do not export or produce abundantly, with the exception of sugar and dairy.
For sugar, we do have a U.S. sugar quota.
Dairy, as reported in a recent daily local newspaper, has already suffered declines with local milk production moving from 38.2 million litres in 1992 to an average of 28.7 million litres at the end of 2000. At the same time imports of milk powder moved from 10.8 million tons in 1992 to 15.7 million tons in 2000.
It is interesting to note that as reported in one of our dailies - the Government of Jamaica has approved the purchase of milk processing equipment for the Jamaican Dairy Farmers Federation, in an effort to keep the domestic dairy industry viable. Money to buy the new equipment came form a loan agreement between the USAID and the GoJ, signed in May 2000.
Frankly, I am not sure that there will be any incremental cost or substantial incremental cost to the Jamaican economy caused by the new U.S. Farm Bill. In fact, some may see benefits.
Furthermore, Jamaica under WTO has the right to increase tariffs to the bound rates on agriculture imports.
We also have allowable safeguards and antidumping remedies.
Therefore, I call upon all interested parties to carefully analyse the impact and present the findings.
I think it would be useful and honest for those engaged in this debate to do so.
Surely countries like Argentina and Brazil with their grain crops ought to have more concern about this U.S. Farm Bill than Jamaica.
Ultimately, it is in the best interest of Jamaica and the agricultural sector to add more value to its outputs and be more market sensitive.
Hence, I think the report coming out of next week by Prof. Anthony Clayton from the University of the West Indies (UWI) which points to opportunities in export of organic produce and other higher value agricultural products as timely.
I believe it is in the best interest of Jamaica to be guided by, if not already done, a high degree of pragmatism and not emotion in crafting our policies toward our giant neighbour, the U.S.
Thus I think it is appropriate that a martial arts analogy be used: whereby an individual takes advantage of the strength and energy of another person.
We in Jamaica must lobby aggressively - just like the ackee case to gain access to the U.S. markets for more of our products like Milo and chicken.
Let us not forget that while the elephants argue Jamaican entrepreneurs and business people out there can and do get burnt as their export and import transactions become more costly and difficult.
Let the policy and opinion makers be mindful of this harsh fact.
