THE CRITICAL IMPORTANCE of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) export market to the survival and prosperity of our local manufacturing companies was brought home to public attention last week when Roberts Manufacturing hosted a visit by the Minister of International Business to the company’s plant.
Managing director Jason Sambrano pointed out that the regional markets were key to his company’s survival. He bluntly declared that his company could not survive on the local market alone.
But he is very concerned about the unfair competition his company is facing from extraregional goods produced in Argentina, Turkey and Malaysia.
We fully understand the businessman’s position since the local market is too small to support the kind of investment that makes a company such as Roberts Manufacturing a viable proposition.
With a population of less than 300 000 souls, this market is indeed very small and that is a matter which has to be borne in mind when some Barbadians speak about the need for local companies to increase employment.
Growth in manufacturing can only be based on sales since no business can survive unless it turns product into money, but as Mr Sambrano disclosed, unfair competition is causing a big problem since extraregional companies were managing to get their cheaper products into the region to the detriment of local producers.
These illegal imports came from countries with lower production costs or from sources where subsidies from governments assisted manufacturers.
He cited an instance in our sister island of Dominica where his company went from selling a great deal of its cooking oil to selling almost nothing overnight.
Many customers praised his company’s quality, but sacrificed quality for price, and Roberts is not the only local company experiencing these problems in trying to sell in the CARICOM market.
Regional governments must tackle unfair competition and its eradication needs to be given the highest priority because jobs and taxes are at risk.
The idea of CARICOM was to ring-fence the region as far as possible from external predatory behaviour of this kind in the interest of the economies of member nations.
Clearly, there are holes in the economic ring-fencing of the region; and fixing the problem will require the skills of our technocrats and political will of our policymakers. The plan to increase trade missions to the region later this year which is being put in place by Minister Donville Inniss is a timely first step.
In spite of these challenges this island has been able to export goods to the value of $336 million last year, but in the absence of unfair competition the figure could be very much higher, and the benefit would be regionally shared since we are stronger together than alone.
At the domestic level, the harsh reality is that this unfair competition will place jobs in local companies in jeopardy, and indeed Roberts has set about aggressively marketing its products to increase market share and thus avoid cutting staff.
But such responsible action by the company has to be matched by equally aggressive approaches by our Government to make sure that regional governments apply the requisite duties on extraregional imports to ensure that the CARICOM export playing field is level. Our exported goods must be treated fairly.
