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That’s right!

Over the next few weeks UK brother’s Craig and Shaun McAnuff from Original Flava will share some tantalising recipes using authentic Caribbean products that you can follow along and prepare easily in your kitchen.

An initiative of Caribbean Export to support raising visibility and awareness of Caribbean products, the Absolutely Caribbean cooking series will feature:

1. Curry shrimp using Naledo’s Truly Turmeric paste

2. Sweet pepper lamb steaks using Firehouse Spices

3. Rum & Tonic using Claytons Kola Tonic

4. Chocolate brownies using Definite Chocolate

5. Curried vegetables using Eatons Mango Jam

6. Gin and champagne cocktail using Blue Light Caribbean Gin

7. Spicey chicken wings using Habanero Trinidad sauce

8. Corn fritters using Elan’s Tamarind BBQ sauce

9. Frothy coffee frappuccino using Trumpet Tree’s Jamaica Blue Mountain Coffee

10. Mango ketchup chicken using Flauriel sauces by Sugar Town Organics

Be sure to follow Absolutely Caribbean on Instagram and look out each Thursday for a new recipe!

March 8 was commemorated as International Women’s Day (IWD) with the theme, ‘Women in Leadership: Achieving an Equal Future in a COVID-19 World’. At the multilateral level, the three international trade organisations, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Trade Centre (ITC); and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) are currently headed by women, one from the CARICOM region.

The Caribbean is recognised by the International Labour Organization (ILO) as a region with a high percentage of female managers. The 2015 statistics showed Jamaica having one of the world’s highest percentage of female managers and a recent report from the World Economic Forum, using ILO 2019 statistics, has Saint Lucia among the top eight countries in the world with the highest number of female managers.

This is not usually reflected in politics, although the region has had several women holding the post of head of government: Eugenia Charles, Dominica; Janet Jagan, Guyana; Portia Simpson Miller, Jamaica; Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Trinidad and Tobago; and, currently, Mia Mottley, Barbados. A number of women have held, and are also holding, ministerial portfolios, though women are still in the minority in Cabinet appointments. In recent general elections, it does appear that more women are entering the political arena. Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, I learnt, have a quota for women candidates presented in general elections.

The CARICOM secretary general, Ambassador Irwin LaRocque, in his IWD remarks stated that the future is more promising when women are equally represented alongside men in leadership roles. As a note, CARICOM’s deputy secretary general is a woman, Ambassador Manorma Soeknandan of Suriname.

WOMEN WITH MINISTERIAL PORTFOLIO IN FOREIGN TRADE

As an IWD encore, considering the theme of women in leadership at the national, regional and multilateral levels, I thought that I would highlight the women in the CARICOM region who currently have ministerial responsibility of the foreign trade portfolios in their countries.

CARICOM Heads, at their 32nd Intersessional Meeting, considered action required to generate economic recovery with the aim to build back better post-COVID-19. Improving intra- and extra-regional trade will make a vital contribution to job creation and economic growth and development. The five female ministers holding this important portfolio are:

1. Senator Kamina Johnson Smith, minister of foreign affairs and foreign trade, Jamaica. Minister Johnson Smith, an attorney-at-law, with qualifications in international relations and commercial law, was appointed to this post in 2016 and reappointed in 2020. She is the first woman to be assigned this portfolio in Jamaica. She has been a senator since 2009.
2. Senator Paula Gopee-Scoon, minister of trade, industry and enterprise development, Trinidad and Tobago. Minister Gopee-Scoon is also a an attorney. In another administration, she was a member of parliament and minister of foreign affairs. She was assigned the trade portfolio in 2015 and retained it in 2020.
3. Cheryl Sandra V. Husbands, MP, minister of foreign trade, Barbados. She was assigned this portfolio in 2018. Husbands has qualifications in international trade policy. She is a business consultant who was president of the Barbados Small Business Association and of the Caribbean Association of Small and Medium Enterprises.
4. Sarah Flood Beaubrun, MP, minister responsible for external affairs in the Office of the Prime Minister, Saint Lucia. She was assigned this portfolio in 2016. She held other ministerial portfolios in the past. Minister Beaubrun was also Speaker of the House and deputy permanent representative of Saint Lucia to the United Nations in New York. She is also an attorney.
5. Senator Wendy Colleen Phipps, minister of international trade, commerce, consumer affairs and labour, St Kitts/Nevis. She was assigned this portfolio in June 2020. A management consultant with training in mass communications, she was a vice-president of the OECS Business Council. In 2015, she was minister of health, community development, gender affairs and social services.

Women have been lauded for their leadership during this pandemic. We look to these women’s further leadership as the region strives to contain the COVID-19 virus and, indeed, endeavours to increase exports of goods and services in order to recover and build back better.

I am also taking this opportunity to salute all the women at the national and regional levels, in the public and private sectors, who are continuing the effort to make progress in intra- and extra-regional trade in these challenging times.

This article which was originally published by the Jamaica Gleaner was submitted by Elizabeth Morgan, Specialist in International Trade Policy and International Politics.

More than a decade has passed since the EU-Cariforum Economic Partnership Agreement, or EPA, was negotiated and signed.

The free-trade agreement with the European Union marked the end of preferential arrangements for Caribbean commodity exports and established a new asymmetric, region-specific basis for trade with the EU’s now 27 member states. Linked to measures intended to encourage development and regional integration, it is mirrored in most respects in a post-Brexit UK-Cariforum EPA.

For the EU, the EPA brought to an end years of battling with the United States and others over the World Trade Organization-compatibility of its long-standing preferential arrangements for its former colonies, reflecting a concern that without development-linked free trade agreements, the erosion of its preference for its traditional partners in the African Caribbean and Pacific group, or ACP, would be unstoppable.

More significantly, leading European governments had a high level if unspoken strategic objective. by pursuing a successful region-specific arrangement with the Caribbean, the EU could begin to differentiate its changing political and economic thinking about Africa, the Pacific and the Caribbean.

The Caribbean saw it differently. A succession of forward-thinking Caricom Prime Ministers and trade negotiators wanted to use the EPA to establish a new and diversified export base in Europe to replace the region’s declining commodity exports and establish new ways to support development, deeper regional integration, and intra-regional trade.

Since then, the shape of global trade has changed dramatically, leaving the background and reasoning behind the EPA obscured in the wake of history, with only technical or contemporary media accounts to explain its role in the Caribbean’s slow post-colonial drift away from Europe.

The publication last month of a report prepared for the European Commission to evaluate the outcomes to date is therefore a valuable reminder and facts-based evidence of the extent to which the fundamentals of the relationship have changed and will probably continue to do so.

The 102-page study for the period 2008-2018 updates previous reports and considers performance against objectives in relation to development, the changing balance of trade, and the EPA’s impact on regional integration.

It is at its most interesting in relation to what it says about changing trade flows and, by extension, how the EU-Caribbean relationship may adapt, even fade, in the coming years. It provides one of the best general analyses of the present EU-Caribbean trade trajectory and a reason to ask whether post-pandemic, new US thinking may accelerate the regional trend away from trade with Europe?

Tellingly, the report notes that in 2018 Cariforum exports to the EU stood at €3.9 billion (US$4.7 billion) while exports from the EU were €5.1 billion (US$6.1 billion), resulting in an overall figure “practically the same as the total trade in 2008 at €9.5 billion”. It also observes that the average annual growth rate of Cariforum exports to the EU for the decade after the implementation of the EPA was just 2 per cent, while EU exports to Cariforum rose by 4 per cent.

Its authors make the point that while 18 per cent of Cariforum imports came from the EU in 2007, by 2018 this had fallen to 12 per cent. Indicating a lack of EU commercial interest in the Caribbean and little European awareness of the EPA, they note that over the same decade, Caribbean imports from countries other than the EU grew at a faster rate.

Cariforum imports of goods from the US in 2018, they observe, were almost four times larger than the value imported from the EU, because of the US’s efficiency in logistics, ease of doing business, geographical distance, language, and transport costs. They also recognise that imports from China are growing rapidly.

Interestingly, the report attempts to review the notoriously difficult to analyse trade in services with the Caribbean. Despite the sector accounting for 35 per cent of Cariforum GDP in 2017 and providing value-added GDP in some countries by as much as 75 per cent, the study provides evidence that the level of EU engagement is ‘largely similar to what it was at the start of the implementation of the EPA’ and Cariforum’s share of services exports to Europe had decreased.

On direct EU investment, the message is more complicated. While the report indicates that Caribbean countries ‘seem to especially stand out for receiving very high levels of FDI in relation to the size of their economies’, it is unable to disentangle the use by multinationals and others of special purpose entities to route financial transactions through Caribbean jurisdictions.

More helpfully when it comes to Brexit, it attempts to draw some preliminary conclusions by disaggregating the UK figures from those of the EU28. Observing that the UK has always been a major trading partner of Cariforum due to historical ties and the region’s use of the UK as an entry point into the EU market, it expresses uncertainty about whether trade flows will now decrease or reroute.

It notes that the share of Cariforum-UK trade has fluctuated between 20 per cent and 10 per cent of total Cariforum-EU trade but indicates that this too has been slowly decreasing to below the pre-EPA level. UK trade, it says, constitutes 11 per cent of total EU exports to Cariforum and 13 per cent of total EU imports and in total amounted to €1.6 billion (US$1.9 billion) In 2018.

Despite the EPA’s heavy institutional structures for political, parliamentary, and civil society dialogue and oversight, the report’s authors suggest that such bodies have not ‘focused enough’ on finding solutions to specific situations affecting individual countries. Despite it being hard to overstate the future importance of services exports from the region, they add, a proposed Committee on Trade in Services has not been established.

The report deserves a full reading. It asks questions about issues that the private sector would take as givens. Most notably, in an almost throwaway line, the report observes “the lack of a joint mechanism for EPA monitoring”. This means its authors say, “there re are no formal benchmarks or indicators to assess the effectiveness of the EPA”, affecting the extent to which the EU and the Caribbean have objective data on which to make decisions regarding the operation of the EPA.

This is a fundamental question which requires an answer. Without a public measure any further decline in the Caribbean’s relationship with Europe will go unnoticed.

Link to EU-Cariforum study – https://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2020/february/tradoc_158657.pdf

This article was originally published by the Jamaica Gleaner . It was written by David Jessop, a consultant to the Caribbean Council. Email: david.jessop@caribbean-council.org. To access previous columns, visit: www.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis.

The Caribbean is bursting with creative talent, much of which is in the music industry. Often, musicians start out honing their talent as a hobby, and struggle financially to make a viable living. Most Caribbean musicians use live performances as their main route to revenue generation, unlike artists outside of the region who have often been able to capitalise on generating revenue streams from digital platforms.

To support the artists’ leveraging the digital space, Caribbean Export Development Agency has hosted a number of initiatives, as part of the 11th EDF Regional Private Sector Development Programme (RPSDP). Since 2017, the Agency has worked with Business Support Organisations (BSOs) specifically the Coalition on Services Industries (CSIs) from across the region to enable those involved in the industry to participate in the Business of Music (BOM) online self-learning platform and face to face workshops. In 2019, a new dimension was developed to this training involving instructor led webinars followed by a two-day workshop in collaboration with COSCAP (Copyright Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers Inc.) and the National Cultural Foundation (NCF) and the ‘knowledge company’ Music Ally Ltd in Barbados. Most recently, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the Agency embarked upon a 60-hour Virtual Regional Song Writing and Music Production Training workshop. Supporting the development of artists beyond hobby-type endeavours was a key driving factor for this workshop.

Coordinated by Herric Horne, a Vincentian Music Executive and owner of Island Network Inc., a full-service artist management and music development company, the workshop hosted some 35 singers, songwriters, and producers from across the Caribbean.

“There was a lot of enthusiasm when it came to certain topics such as how do you monetize your intellectual property and create different revenue streams. The struggle is to get the mindset of the practitioner right, get them to understand that we operate a business and understand how to run the business. In a global context, we are rich in talent like any geographic location but in terms of business opportunities, we need to be on a bigger playing field with the bigger players to yield that return that is due to us,” Mr. Horne said.

The Virtual Regional Song Writing and Music Production Training workshop was developed in collaboration with the OECS Competitive Business Unit and resulted in some 23 tracks being produced for a virtual showcase aimed at international music executives.

To develop the tracks, cross-genre collaboration was encouraged with participants; artists, producers, songwriters from different countries working together and leveraging skills of expert producers. Lead tutor Shamel Hughes (USA) together with De Red Boyz (Barbados), Parry Jack (St. Vincent and the Grenadines based in USA), Kasey Phillips (Trinidad and Tobago based in USA), Krishna Lawrence (Dominica), Christopher Birch (Jamaica) and Grammy Award winning Marcus Allen and Andrew Clifton (USA) proved invaluable for participants .

Latin Will, an artist and producer from the Dominican Republic, shared that production was his most favourite part of the training. Participants were placed in seven groups and rotated daily to work with seven expert industry producers. “I’m a mix engineer but I learned from some amazing mixing and mastering tricks from our tutor Shamel Hughes. I also learnt how to work with people with many different dialects.” He also added, “Caribbean music is one of the most influential around the world and it is the most underappreciated.”

Expert producer Krishna ‘Dada’ Lawrence whose portfolio includes the 2019 road march hit, ‘Famalay’ which feature soca sensations Machel Montano, Skinny Fabulous and Bungi Garlin worked directly with participants to produce a cadre of songs and had nothing but praise for the workshop’s organisers. “I think it’s important that we continue those training camps. Collaboration within the islands is paramount to the development of the Caribbean music industry. We are all unique; sharing and working with each other is the best way to sell and promote our uniqueness,” he said, adding that attention also needed to be given to legalities, ownership, copyright and the fundamentals of running a company.

The 23 tracks were produced with videos and aired virtually in a live music showcase in December 2020 to major record labels, promoters, music scouts, distributors from the US, Europe and Asia. “We are targeting buyers from Europe, North American, Africa and the hip hop industry. Trying to maximize the returns on these intellectual properties is our first step, then we will come back and look at developing artists from the camp, assigning them songs and building their careers. Everyone stands to benefit, artists, producers, song writers, as all rights have been assigned to them.”

The response to the showcase was extremely positive, with requests for follow-up meetings and negotiations with international music distributors. As we approach the 2nd year of the pandemic, we look ahead to continued collaboration and support making a business out of music.

The Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM’s) outlook for 2021 could be a very short article; summary – not so good. The year 2021 is starting with general uncertainty about the trade and economic outlook. Much will depend on how countries are able to contain COVID-19 and the availability of vaccines to most countries enabling them to return to a fair level of normality. Reports indicate that tourism will be slow to recover as will global oil demand. In addition, St Vincent and the Grenadines is on La Soufriere volcano watch and political unrest continues in Haiti.

The year 2020 began with some expectation for recovery and growth. By March, with the spread of COVID-19, travel restrictions and the lockdown of economies, years of progress were reversed, especially in the Caribbean, where several countries have 20 per cent or more of their gross domestic product (GDP) coming from tourism. From September to October, there was inclement weather in some islands resulting in damage to agriculture and infrastructure. With the exception of Guyana, which registered growth of about 31 per cent due to oil production, most CARICOM member states saw a severe decline in their GDP.

CARICOM’s external trade with third countries and intra-regional trade for 2020 are difficult to assess, at this point, as statistics for all the member states are not yet available. However, for principal trade partner, the USA, in 2019, CARICOM imported goods valued at US$14.04 billion and exported US$6.23 billion. Figures from the US Census Bureau for January to November 2020 show that CARICOM goods imports were valued at US$10 billion, while exports were valued at US$4.41 billion. With the December figures added, the value of the CARICOM-US merchandise trade could see a decline. The Statistical Institute of Jamaica’s Merchandise Trade Bulletin shows that Jamaica’s trade for January to August 2020 registered an overall decline and the trend is expected to continue to December.

In trade in services, tourism mainly, available figures for The Bahamas, from January to August 2020 show that tourist arrivals were about 35 per cent of the 2019 figure. For Jamaica, from January to October 2020, arrivals were 34 per cent of the 2019 figure. This was the general trend for CARICOM countries dependent on tourism. For those countries with petroleum as a principal industry, there was also a decline, as demand was reduced due to restrictions in travel and production.

For 2020, CARICOM countries were focused on containing the spread of COVID-19, trying to rescue economies, deliberating on building back better and the role which the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) would play.

DIM OUTLOOK FOR 2021

By October 2020, international organisations, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF), were forecasting the outlook for 2021. In the IMF Blog, the forecast was for a recovery of four per cent for the Caribbean countries dependent on tourism from a decline of nearly 10 per cent in 2020 and 3.8 per cent for the commodity exporters from a decline of 0.6 per cent.

Although there was optimism about vaccines at the end of 2020, the reality check is that 2021 has not had such a great start. COVID-19 cases are increasing in the USA, Canada, United Kingdom (UK), European Union (EU) member states, China, India, Africa, and in Latin America and the Caribbean with new strains. In fact, Latin America and the Caribbean is listed as one of the worst affected regions. There are further restrictions in some countries. Canada and the UK are now requiring persons entering their countries to have a negative COVID-19 test. This places an added burden on Caribbean countries which must now provide these tests on a larger scale.

Vaccines have been approved and are being used in the USA, Canada, UK, EU, and Australia. Japan is seeking approval of the Pfizer vaccine by February. China, Cuba, India and Russia have developed and are using their own vaccines. Interestingly, New Zealand has declared that it is COVID free.

CARICOM and other developing countries have signed to the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) COVID-19 Global Access Facility (COVAX) for access to vaccines. Under COVAX, it seems that two billion doses of the Pfizer vaccine have been secured already for global distribution in 2021, with another 1.3 billion to come in 2022. The first doses will target 20 per cent of beneficiary countries. The director of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), the regional arm of WHO, Dr Carissa Etienne, has announced that vaccines’ distribution will commence in the Americas in March. It should reach CARICOM countries by April. From media reports, however, it seems that a very small amount of a COVID vaccine was available in Barbados recently.

GLOBAL INEQUALITIES

As with many things, the inequalities in the global community are being starkly demonstrated in the availability of vaccines. The developed countries will be the first to have access to these vaccines, and the developing countries will be on the bottom rungs of the ladder. For successful global recovery, all countries need to recover, not only a few.

This article which was originally published by the Jamaica Gleaner was submitted by Elizabeth Morgan, Specialist in International Trade Policy and International Politics.