It is probably without precedent for a major Caribbean industry to declare that unless CARICOM’s Common External Tariff (CET) is properly enforced, the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of rural and other workers will be put at risk.
For this reason, the March 15th statement by the normally conservative Sugar Association of the Caribbean (SAC) needs to be taken seriously. SAC observed that unless the CARICOM Secretariat, and by extension Caribbean trade ministers, do not take “definitive and immediate action through the Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED),” the industry may not have a future.
SAC’s concern is that the industry can only survive if, as it has previously made clear, the existing 40 per cent Common External Tariff (CET) on all sugar imports is rigorously applied.
Observing that this is not happening, SAC said that having gathered market intelligence across the region, it has found that “more than two-thirds of CARICOM’s sugar demand is currently being supplied by extra regional sugar imports.” This is happening, they observe, even though the industry in CARICOM annually produces more sugar than the Anglophone part of the region requires.
