TT not making use of free trade agreement with Costa Rica

One such opportunity is the Costa Rican market. Sheri Joseph, business development executive in the TT Trade Promotion Office at Procomer, the Costa Rican export promotion agency, said last year Costa Rica exported $60 million worth of products to this country while local businesses sent a mere $16 million worth of goods to the Central American country.

This despite the fact CARICOM and Costa Rica signed a Free Trade Agreement in 2005.

Joseph said the reason the trade between the two countries is so lopsided is lack of information among local businesses. To correct this shortcoming, Procomer and Essential Costa Rica, another Government agency in that country, joined exporTT to host a forum “Why Costa Rica?” at the Westmoorings office of the TT Chamber of Industry and Commerce.

The forum was held in conjunction with JMMB and the Guardian Group and chief executive officer of the chamber Gabriel Faria said in his welcome remarks it will form part of the chamber’s BusinessInsights series.

Joseph said in a couple of months there will be another workshop attended by an official from the Caricom Secretariat, another joint effort between the Chamber, Procomer and exporTT.

She said at that workshop they will look at companies which, based on yesterday’s workshop, have determined what opportunities they want to explore, look deeper into the process required to get products into Costa Rica or get products from Costa Rica to Trinidad; examine different areas of the Free Trade Agreement such as rules of origin and even look more at the expansion of trade in services. She said the area of services has not been explored at all and there were very few companies doing it but there are a lot of advantages for companies in that area.

“We have a Free Trade Agreement but it’s not being used.

People tend to look at other markets but Costa Rica is going to be a natural market for us. In fact, Costa Rica looks at CARICOM as a natural market for their products which is why Costa Rica opened a trade promotion office here because they saw how important it was. So we want to see if that can be done reciprocally.” Joseph runs the Procomer office in Trinidad and Tobago which was opened 14 years ago. “We are very proud now that 90 per cent of the carrots on the local market are Costa Rican carrots and if you look in the supermarket you will see pasta, sauces and jams and construction products. She said a lot of the pepper sauce on the market is being made from pepper mash imported from Costa Rica because some local companies went to Costa Rica and showed the farmers how to grow the peppers they needed and to produce it in the required quantities and ship it here and they used that as the raw material to produce the pepper sauce.”