CSME Network News, May 27, 2009 : The Wednesday business feature of the Jamaica Gleaner is reporting that Tastee Limited is the Jamaican company at the heart of the trade imbroglio between Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.
On Monday Prime Minister Bruce Golding told Journalists in Montego Bay "We are going to insist that when we send our patties down there we don't want to hear that they are held up on the wharf because people need to come and inspect our processing facilities."
The Jamaican Prime Minister pointed out "We have standards. We have standards organisations. We can't fly over the world to inspect every little packing house everywhere and that is why we have international standards and specification that we adhere to. And, therefore, when we produce a certificate from the Bureau of Standards we expect it to be respected.
"It is really a means of frustrating trade. And that is not something that we can tolerate," said Golding.
According to Wednesday Business It could not be ascertained if the inspection was of Tastee's Montego Bay production facilities, from where, according to the company's website, it exports to Caribbean markets, including Antigua, Cayman Islands, St Kitts and Nevis, Barbados and Trinidad.
However it pointed out that “the issue of standards has been central to the use of sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) measures to block or delay the entry of Jamaican meat and meat products in Trinidad.”
Last week Jamaica’s foreign trade minister, Ken Baugh, said Caricom trade problems were being resolved and the resolution of the patty dispute involves common SPS standards being accepted within the regional bloc.
"We agreed a set of steps towards achieving common standards governing SPS and related measures, and we are confident the process will move forward," undersecretary for Trade at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Ambassador Wayne McCook, told Wednesday Business.
"We also secured agreement that trade and SPS officials of member states will sit down to work through the details of these issues."
Prime Minister Golding also pointed to the situation with Belize, where he said a punitive duty had been placed on exports of the Jamaican beer in an effort to protect their own domestic market.
However he said Foreign Trade Minister Ken Baugh recently held discussions with his counterpart from Belize when he was at the COTED meeting and it is believed that a way has been found a way to resolve that dispute.
The “problem of trade in a single market cannot be that ministers must get involved when every time a shipment goes off. If we have a single market we have a single market and these obstacles must not be shown up,” the Jamaican Prime Minister lamented.
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