CMC:

Jamaica on Friday called on its Caribbean Community (CARICOM) neighbours to devise a proper mechanism that would lead to increased intra-regional trade.

"Trade and the smooth flow of trade can't be dependent on an exporter getting hold of a minister who picks up a phone to call his counterpart who calls him back and eventually things are sorted out," Prime Minister Bruce Golding told reporters.

Golding's remarks came in light of the recent controversy over the export of Jamaican patties to Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados. The two CARICOM countries had claimed that the necessary sanitary standards were not in keeping with international requirements.

The Jamaican prime minister said what was needed in the region was the establishment of a "proper framework for those rules".

He recalled a commitment given by Caribbean leaders many years ago to establish standards that would be common to all countries.

Need to get cracking

"We haven't done that yet, we need to get cracking on that. We also need to determine how we are going to deal with the question of certification," he said, noting that under World Trade Organi-sation (WTO) rules, a country reserves the right to do risk assessments of imports into its country.

Golding said it was "ironic and absurd that the European Union has accepted the Jamaica standards organisations and no longer need to inspect our facilities because they accept the validation that is provided by our Bureau of Standards and veterinary services, and yet our own CARICOM partners won't accept the certification from our standards organisation".

Work to be done

Golding admitted that there was a lot of work still to be done, explaining that the issue was very important to the entire region because it was not just "one shipment of ackee or one shipment of cranberry-flavoured water".

"Where it hurts significantly and adversely for the future is that exporters are going to get tired of the frustration and therefore, they will not seek to build markets within the region," he said, giving an example of one Jamaican exporter who told him he was no longer bothering with the Caribbean but instead, was now concentrating on other markets, and even paying the high duties involved.