Barbadian businesses must seek out more benefits from the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), which was not designed to accommodate only goods and services, said Carol Lynch, director of research at the Barbados Investment Development Corporation (BIDC).
Lynch was speaking during her presentation at a workshop on Exporting To The UK.
She urged businesspeople to relinquish the notion that the agreement, which was signed almost three years ago by CARICOM and the Dominican Republic with the European Union, was only valid between the region and the United Kingdom.
The EPA is an agreement that governs trade between the European Union (EU), its member states and African, Caribbean and Pacific States.
“For the most part, people seem to think that there are some secrets hidden in the agreement for how you can access the benefits and that is not true. That is a myth.
“The agreement is a very transparent one. It provides for a whole set of packages across many disciplines but at the end of the day, in addition to liberalisation of trade, it provides a very strong development component,” she explained.
According to Lynch, the EPA “focuses on facilitating economic restructuring of our economies”.
“We want to be able to be more competitive on the international front and the only way we can do that is if we enable the capacity to trade and address some of the limitations that confront us when we try to enter these markets.”
She said perhaps one of the most “beneficial provisions” in the agreement was innovation and intellectual property.
“We just can’t take a look at goods. We have to look at the other provisions and we recognise that innovation is core to the competitiveness in the future.
“And very often I think that CARICOM is considered to be at the tail end of that innovation circle, and we want to begin to close some of those gaps and implore our people to be more innovative – so this agreement caters to some of those,” said the research specialist.
Lynch told the entrepreneurs that the EPA benefits were “developmental” and “forward-looking”, noting that the trade agreement which replaced the former non-reciprocal trade arrangements “forces” companies to become more competitive, Lynch encouraged those attending the workshop to be proactive and know where they wanted to take their businesses.
“Whether it is in standards or labelling or in attending to regulatory matters, there are provisions for that – but at the end of the day, manufacturers and businesspersons are going to have to be proactive in how they access the benefits that are provided,” she said.
