Business View Caribbean
3
members and acting as the sector’s representative to
the government and its regulatory agencies. Accord-
ing to Pengelley, “The master plan is to promote local
manufacturing wherever possible as a national priority
– and to do that through collaboration with the govern-
ment of Jamaica at whatever point in time.”
From its beginnings, the JMA has worked with suc-
cessive Jamaican administrations to help promulgate
numerous legislative, regulatory, and tax policies and
reforms, designed to help the country’s manufacturing
industry prosper, while simultaneously advancing the
overall health of the Jamaican economy. It is still one
of the Association’s major functions. “The strength
of the Association is actually the power of our lobby,”
Pengelley maintains. “And the power of the lobby has
come from influential membership but it also comes
from a spirit of collaboration. The government has its
own agenda and its own problems, so we have stood
by its side to contribute and collaborate to make sure
we get the right results for Jamaica, overall, but, cer-
tainly, for our manufacturers.”
A key achievement, according to Pengelley, was con-
vincing the government not to tax inputs into the
manufacturing process, but rather to levy a tax on the
market side. He explains why: “Every time you drive
up the cost of inputs, you drive up the cost at the very
beginning of the process, so before you even convert
that raw material into a product, you’re incurring high
costs. And on an island where about 90 percent of our
raw materials are imported, you’re paying for that way
in advance of actually going through the conversion
process.”
In the late 1980s, with the help of JMA’s interven-
– Ribbon Cutting: Expo 2014 is opened with Ribbon Cutting. (L-R Anthony Hylton, Minister of Investment, Industry and
Commerce; Gary Sinclair, CEO of LIME [LIME is one of the island’s two major telecoms providers); Brian; Prime Minister
Portia Simpson-Miller; Marjory Kennedy, President of the Jamaica Exporters’ Association
