7 News Belize

Meeting WTO Standards
posted (October 24, 2014)
For the past 5 days, all the government agencies involved in trade have been participating in workshop for Trade Facilitation Need Assessment.

As a member of the World Trade Organization, Belize has to ensure that the trade apparatus being used is compatible with the rest of the WTO members. The main goal of the assessment was to determine if the country is ready to implement the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement, which was approved by the Trade Ministers for all the members in Indonesia in November 2013.

Now, it might sound like boring talk-shop to you, but the technocrats say it is needed to streamline trade. Today, the Director of Foreign Trade explained what the assessment has revealed so far about the weakness in the system:

Dr. Leroy Almendarez, Director of Trade
"One of first things we need to work with is to get the legislations in place. If it's in draft form, then we have to make sure that it becomes move from draft and be enacted because some of these things require legislation in order for Customs and the other entities to do what they need to do. We also looked at different measures that would have been in place by BAHA. We look at things like border agency cooperation, how does that exits? We also look at a single window, in other words where you have agencies working together and that has not been complied with, but one of the big things that came out of, because this is not the first time that this had happen, in 2009 there was a needs assessment and what came out of that was Customs having its Asycuda World system which has helped them quite a bit because of ports of entry. The main thing here is what you don't want for goods to stay too long in some area because some of these goods are perishable goods. So all those things we had to look at; how do you treat goods that have been detained and what measures are in place because on the other side that importer for example, if it's perishable, then it has to be stored somewhere. In one case we found out perishable goods that we do not have the level of cold storage that we would need across the country in order to take of that, so those are some of the things that we have looked at and in some cases now, we need traditional human resources; that is trained people and if we need to do that how does that happen? We need infrastructure to put mechanisms in place. The question what we have decided to do is when we look at the measures we will turn some of these things into projects."

The results of this assessment will form the basis for sourcing available funding from donor partners.

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