Coalition of Services Industries in St Lucia to have positive impact
Monday, March 7, 2005
CASTRIES, St. Lucia: Stakeholders of a
recently formed Coalition of Services Industries in St. Lucia will get an
opportunity on the weekend to learn more about the work of the organization
and discuss its future importance to the services sector on the island and the
wider region. The exercise, to take place at
the NIC Conference Centre on Saturday, March 5th, 2005 is being conducted
ahead of the official launch of the organization, slated for sometime in April
of this year.
The event will help sensitize stakeholders
to the issues and purpose of the organization, in anticipation of some of the
challenges that professionals and organizations providing services will have
to face, because of St. Lucia’s association with various trading arrangements,
such as the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) and the World Trade
Organisation (WTO). It has taken two years of
consultations between government, the OECS Trade Policy Project and the
Chamber of Commerce to bring the coalition to this point. An interim board was
set up in November of 2004, to put in place the institutional and legal
structures necessary for the establishment of the organization.
Interim President of the St. Lucia Coalition
of Services Industries, Althea Valmont said, “The coalition of services is an
organization, which focuses on meeting some of those challenges and informing
those who may be affected by these changes of ways of meeting these
challenges.” According to Foreign Service
Officer in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Stephen Fevriere, the services
sector in St. Lucia contribute significantly to the overall gross domestic
product (GDP), and therefore it has been recognized that it is important for
the sector to organize itself to more effectively feed into governmental
policy.
“It is very important that at this time, the
services sector appreciate the importance of what is happening multilaterally
and can use this forum to create and affect policy, which will be beneficial
to their interest, and help feed these policies into government policy; that
is one component. The other component is at the national level, assisting the
services providers in enhancing their service capacity to compete,” Mr.
Fevriere explained.
CARICOM Council of Trade and Economic
Development (COTED) at a meeting in 2001, agreed to the formation of national
Coalitions of Services Industries in each member state of the Community. To
date, only Barbados and St. Lucia have established coalitions.
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