Food trade dispute between Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago rumbles on
03 September 2012
In mid 2012 the use by the Trinidadian authorities of food safety and SPS-related measures to prevent the importation of food products from Barbados, came to the fore. According to the Executive Director of the Barbados Manufacturers Association (BMA), this has affected not only dairy exports from Barbados but also milled flour exports. The Executive Director of the BMA called for Barbadian consumers to ‘read labels’ and ‘speak with their wallets’ in response to the actions of the Trinidadian authorities.
These statements came against the background of a meeting in St Lucia of the Prime Ministerial sub-committee on the CARICOM Single Market and Economy. The prime minister of Barbados, chairing the meeting, called for the conclusion of a protocol with Trinidad and Tobago to deal with outstanding issues blocking exports of Barbadian goods. Progress, however, appears to be under way, with officials of Pine Hill Dairy now ‘reporting a resolution to their seeming impasse with Trinidadian authorities’. The Trinidadian authorities have ‘agreed to allow the Barbados company to sell its existing “disputed” packaging of evaporated milk, fresh milk and flavoured milk, until it could change the labels’. In return, ‘Pine Hill Dairy (PHD) had agreed to change its “non-compliant” labelling within six months’. This is seen as opening up new export opportunities, with the first consignments of renewed Barbadian dairy exports due to be on the shelves in Trinidad and Tobago by the end of July 2012.
Meanwhile, in July 2012 the launch of a US$9.25 million EU-funded programme for the CARICOM Regional Organisation for Standards and Quality (CROSQ) was announced. This programme is intended to facilitate CARICOM exports to the EU, although it is acknowledged that the programme could also facilitate regional trade.
Editorial comment
Despite repeated policy statement and initiatives, intra-CARICOM trade in food and agricultural products has declined decade on decade since the 1970s. Numerous trade policy studies have attributed the diminishing contribution of agriculture in intra-regional trade (and as well extra-regional trade) to limited production capacity and other supply-side constraints.
While this is indeed so, much of the poor intra-regional agri-food trade performance is related to food safety (especially for fresh foods) and divergent standards (especially for processed foods). Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago are the major food manufacturers in the Caribbean, in terms of the range, sophistication and volume of production. For each, the regional market, especially for the smaller OECS countries, is of critical importance. Yet these three major producers have had a range of trade disputes in the past, largely associated with technical barriers to trade and SPS issues.
The current impasse, over what is essentially an upgraded version of a product which was already present on the Trinidad and Tobago market, throws up a number of standards issues, including over-onerous standards and inconsistent labelling requirements. In some instances regional products that deviate from national standards in Trinidad and Tobago are subject to conditions more onerous than those attached to third-country products which do not conform to these same national standards. This would appear to be inconsistent with Article 79 of the revised Treaty on General Provisions on Trade Liberalization, which forbids Member States from applying trade practices which distort competition.
There appears to be a need to review the institutional application of these provisions, given the frequency of similar trade disputes. This may require an explicit insertion of a role for laboratories certified by the CARICOM Regional Organisation for Standards and Quality (CROSQ), in order to enhance trade facilitation in the region.
If the current dispute gives rise to the establishment of a clear and transparent regional institutional framework for the efficient and speedy resolution of such disputes, drawing on a regionally approved architecture of technical support, then it will have made a long-term contribution to the promotion of intra-regional trade in agro-food products.
