4
Business View Caribbean
Samuda:
“Our foreign investment portfolio is handled
by JAMPRO (Jamaica Promotions Corporation), one of
the agents of government, and, of course, the Ministry.
I, myself, just returned from London two weeks ago,
where we met with distributors and regulators to de-
termine the criteria under which our exports are ac-
cepted into their country. And we are hoping to give
them the level of confidence that they need to pur-
chase our goods by maintaining international stan-
dards on a consistent basis. If we are not certified, we
won’t be able to attract the markets that we are seek-
ing to penetrate. That’s one of our main missions – to
convince purchasing agents overseas that our prod-
ucts carry the level of integrity and consistency that
is required and meet all the sanitary requirements of
international trade.”
BVM: Is the Ministry involved in the ongoing process
of attempting to establish Jamaica as one of the
world’s major international logistics hubs alongside
Singapore, Dubai, and Rotterdam?
Samuda:
“As a government, we are all plugged in to
the notion of making Jamaica an attractive destina-
tion for transshipment. We have one of the seven best
natural harbors in the world; we are ideally located.
But, like most of the ports along the eastern seaboard
of America, we have had to dredge our port facilities in
order to make way for these larger vessels, now com-
ing through the Panama Canal. We are about to start
dredging now, so we will be accommodating them in
short order.
“In addition to that, we are seeking to build out, adja-
cent to our main Port of Kingston, and also in Montego
Bay, logistics facilities to accommodate transshipment
in a meaningful way. And, of course, to be considered
an effective logistics hub, you have to have the basic
infrastructure in place, such as multi-modal transpor-
tation – air, land, sea, and rail. So we are busy at work
trying to make sure that all of these infrastructure re-
quirements are in place as soon as possible. So far,
we have done extremely well in our ‘soft’ infrastruc-
ture. For instance, our telecommunications is quite
advanced. Our hard infrastructure – our road system
and our transportation sector is constantly being im-
proved. We have our challenges, but we are becoming
much more advanced in making those facilities that
are required, available to the international investing
community.”
BVM: How do these improvements and upgrades get
financed?
