What region’s private sector needs to do

BRIDGETOWN — The region’s private sector has to strengthen its own capacity to take advantage of international trade agreements negotiated by the Caribbean Community and also how to help make the emerging Single Market and Economy (CSME) successful in the general effort to advance economic development.

Suggestions on the impact of development of trade negotiations on the region’s private sector and implications for the sector of the CSME were discussed at the one-day ‘Private Sector Summit 2002’ held on Monday in Barbados by the Caribbean Development Bank in collaboration with the Caribbean Association of Industry and Commerce.

For example, the Caribbean Export Development Agency (CEDA), of which Vaughn Renwick is executive director, feels that the private sector’s capacity to engage in governmental decision-making and their inclusion in that process “is now more than ever a priority”.

The strengthening and enhancement of that capacity must, however, be effected “sooner than later through skills development and the creation andor strengthening of mechanisms for dialogue between the public and the private sector…”.

So far as the implication for the private sector of the CSME is concerned, Desiree Field-Ridley of the CARICOM Secretariat thinks that the CSME will only be “as good as the extent to which the private sector takes advantage of the framework which is being established”.

The CSME, she said, provides challenges and opportunities and has some distinct advantages over the global liberalisation process in what is being provided for achieving competitiveness.

At the opening session of the summit on Monday, various representatives of the private sector were critical of lack of proper consultation with the private sector and their approaches to regional macroeconomic development.

They also urged that the Regional Negotiating Machinery (RNM) be more pro-active in dialogue with the private sector before pursuing negotiations on behalf of the Caribbean.

Recommendations from the summit will help to inform the CDB in shaping a new partnership approach for development with the private sector.

Prison problem in new anti-crime campaign

PORT-OF-SPAIN — If the minister of national security, Howard Chin Lee, has cause to be pleased with his recently introduced anti-crime campaign, the government is now confronted with complaints of a worsening overcrowded prison problem, partly as a consequence of the more aggressive efforts to combat crime.

General Secretary of the Prison Officers Association (Second Division), Michael Mollineau, has disclosed that a delegation from the association will be meeting with the National Security Minister today when they will discuss both staff shortages and the problem of coping with an expanding prison population.

Mollineau said that the association was not in any way opposed to the anti-crime campaign that was resulting in a number of arrests. But the association wants the government to also pay attention to the working problems, the stress, being faced by prison officers with the increasing population, including the ‘remand section’ and the maximum security prison.

UWI hospital gets MRI Unit

BRIDGETOWN — The campuses of the University of the West Indies as well as regional medical institutions have been alerted to the recent acquisition by the University Hospital of a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) Unit.

In order to generate interest among medical practitioners and other interested parties in the new technology, the Radiology Department of the UWI’s hospital will host a seminar on Saturday, March 9.

The seminar, titled “MRI — New Options, Exciting Possibilities” is an attempt to introduce the machine and its possibilities to the medical fraternity, according to Dr Wayne West, head of the Department of Radiology.