MONTEGO BAY — The Tourism Product Development Company (TPDCo) is pushing to have the island’s craft traders licensed before the tourist season officially starts on December 15.

December 10 has been set as the deadline for a thrust that has been on the table for the last three years. The plan is to have the traders licensed, upgrade the facilities and market them with the long-term goal of increasing business for the struggling sector.

Craft traders have long complained that the state has not done enough to help boost business but according to TPDCo’s director of standards, Mary Helen Reece, the licensing effort will be combined with other measures to improve the craft markets across the island.

“We are already in the process of starting a marketing campaign for Jamaica Craft. We cannot market a sub-standard product; when we get local and international visitors to come to the markets, we want them to have a good experience,” Reece said.

Marketing efforts, she said, include a poster and radio jingle and ads in a cruise shipping publication.

Attempts to get an indication of how many of the island’s traders have actually been licensed to date were unsuccessful, but only a third of the 254 traders at Harbour Street, Montego and the 215 at the Negril facility have obtained the licences.

According to head of the Harbour Street facility, Melody Haughton, now that the government has come up with a plan, it is time for the traders to step up to the plate.

A little less than 150 of her association members have completed the Team Jamaica component of the licensing programme but only 50 have actually pursued the process to the end by obtaining the Jamaica Tourist Board licence.

“All of us decided that in order for government to really do what they can do for us, they have to guarantee the business persons that the markets are safe. One of the procedures is getting licensed and, I must be honest, they have been asking us to do that for the past three years,” an obviously frustrated Haughton told the Observer yesterday. “Some persons have completed the exercise and some are just not willing. They just don’t want to do it. And if we don’t get ourselves licensed we cannot continue to blame government. They give us something to work with, so let us do it. If we do it and we go back to them now, and they don’t do what they promised we can hold them responsible. But right now we are at fault.”

Wesley Buchanan is among the 150 craft traders at Harbour Street who has gone through the Team Jamaica programme but hasn’t actually obtained the licence. He has been in the sector for more than 20 years and agrees that licensing is necessary. He says he is working towards getting his.

Unlike some, Buchanan has already gone through the written and oral two-week course that addresses topics such customer service and the history of the island.

Once the course is completed, applicants must pay a $2,000 fee, provide two photographs and two recommendations, their shop number and rent receipt and their licece will be forwarded to their association president. There is then an annual fee of $750.

In the Negril facility where Theo Chambers is in charge, the picture is slightly different from that at Harbour Street. Chambers said another batch of applications had been submitted to TPDCo on Wednesday and he expects that all the traders there will be licensed by the December 10 deadline.

Haughton was not so optimistic about the future of the unlicensed traders at the Harbour Street facility. Those who fail to comply, she said, were hampering those who wanted to move forward and should be weeded out of the system.

“The government is giving us a deadline and I support it 100 per cent because it is unfair for some of us to comply with rules and regulations and get ourselves in line and yet still cannot benefit,” she argued. “I think the government should move them out of the system. Those of us who want to work with the system, work with it. Those who don’t want to work with it, they should take them out and don’t let them hold up the system.”