In a few days’ time, CARICOM’s Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED) will meet.
Among the topics that Ministers and officials will consider are several recommendations that will determine whether the sugar industry has a future.
This long overdue discussion will explore whether there are ways in which the region’s cane sugar producers, through tariffs and other measures, can redirect output towards meeting the CARICOM market’s requirements.
Just over a month ago, on October 1, the industry lost the last vestige of its preferential market in the European Union (EU) which abolished, as a long-planned domestic measure, national sugar production quotas in Europe. The effect, according to industry analysts, is that the price paid for African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) cane sugar will very rapidly reduce and, as Europe becomes self-sufficient in beet sugar and begins to export, cane sugar imports into Europe will fall to zero.