CARICOM hosting sensitisation workshop on competition laws
GEORGETOWN, Guyana (CMC) — The Guyana-based Caribbean Community Secretariat (CARICOM) Competition Commission Monday held a sensitisation workshop with members of the National Assembly as part of a programme to implement and strengthen competition laws and policies in the 15-member CARICOM grouping.
“This project that we are engaged in the whole of CARICOM is a general project about sensitising people about competition culture. This is an on-going exercise… the general citizenry still have to be sensitised to consumer welfare and to the virtue and value of competition.
“It is not something that people readily embrace and here in the Caribbean; it is a contest with our own history because of the way in which business is being developed,” said Dr Kusha Haraksingh, the Chairman of the CARICOM Competition Commission.
He said that the sensitisation workshop, which is being facilitated through the Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM) and CARICOM, will contribute to a change in the way business is transacted in Guyana.
The CARICOM Secretariat here has noted that a competition policy is generally unexplored territory in the Caribbean however, Jamaica adopted this policy in 1993 followed by Barbados in 2002, Dominican Republic in 2008, Guyana in 2010, with enforcement in 2012, and Trinidad and Tobago in 2006, but the enforcement still to be initiated.
It said competition law provisions play a critical role in the development and establishment of open and competitive markets in the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) for entrepreneurs, professionals and established businesses.
Haraksingh noted that the key aspects of competition law policy being enforced is the prevention of anti-competitive agreements between companies, dominance abuse and merger control regulation.
He said that the parliamentarians’ role is to ensure a secure economic balance in a country with the establishment of a jurisprudence competition law.
Speaker of the National Assembly, Dr Barton Scotland said that the sensitisation workshop will assist in the implementation of a National Competition framework in CARICOM member states.
