After a near decade, with little that the Patterson Administration can truly lay claim to as a success of its industrial policy, a new ‘vision’ called Export 2010, is emerging with similar hopes of fantastic growth in trade.

Jampro has been given a lead role in the new efforts to arrest and reverse the trade deficit, under a six-year plan of targeted support for private sector companies which have serious potential to earn hard currency.

The plan marks an aggressive shift in policy to develop a stronger export base by repositioning local companies to compete worldwide, as Jamaica struggles with the reality that despite $5.2 billion invested in a ‘trade support network’ over the years, the trade gap continues to widen.

Those monies were largely spent by the ministries of industry ($1.5-b), finance ($1.3-b) and foreign affairs ($0.9-b).

There has been nominal growth in exports over the decades – US$1.28 billion as at February 2004 – but Jamaica’s trading partners have been more adept at getting the country to buy their goods.

The result is a trade deficit that has now dipped to record lows of about US$1.9 billion.

Export 2010 is meant to grow overseas sales, mostly in the non-traditional sector, by an annual nine-per cent. And through the TSN, bring some $3 billion of earnings from exports by bringing goods and services in sync with global demand.

The new programme “focuses Jamaica on specific export targets”, Jampro chairman, Joseph Matalon told Observer editors and senior reporters last Wednesday.

But to get there requires a revamping of companies to bring them in line with standards that super traders like the United States and the European Union demand of their trading partners at every stage of the production process.

“The markets are there,” said Jampro president Patricia Francis. But a chief challenge is certification and inefficient production methods.

Jamaica is well on track for the July deadline for compliance with the new International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code, but country-specific adherence, it appears, is not sufficient.

Shipments from Jamaica can be rejected if any of the last 10 countries where the ship might have berthed is not ISPS compliant, Francis said.

At a more micro-level, exporters are required to satisfy new phytosanitary standards especially for food exports and put facilities for testing in place that are expensive and pose challenges for developing countries like Jamaica to satisfy.

But compliance is a requirement if companies are to compete comfortably at world levels, which means they have little choice but to upgrade their systems and efficiencies.

Jampro has been given the job of turning that situation around under the new Private Sector Development Programme (PSDP), a EU-backed project to build capacity within companies.

The PSDP also goes further to assist the company develop its business systems and helps with export promotion and market penetration.

The programme ends in four years, coinciding with the beginning of the end of preferential access to EU markets.

The 28.7-million programme (1 euro = J$74) scheduled to come on stream in August, will provide grant assistance under a cost-sharing plan that provides project-specific financing to qualified companies up to a maximum of 80,000 euro.

The company is expected to upfront 25 per cent of the cost of the project, while PSDP will cover the other 75 per cent.

Under the competitiveness building component, the company can access up to 75,000 euros in three tranches, but has to cover a higher percentage of the project cost at each stage up to a maximum of 60 per cent.

Jampro, under its new mandate to provide improved services to exporters, has analysed what Francis described as the “growth poles” in markets around the world and is carefully targeting companies that have the potential to service areas that are opening up.

“We sit with individual companies to get their targets and advise them on what it will take to reach it,” Francis said.

Export 2010 is attempting to attack the deficit from two angles – export growth and reduced reliance on imports.

Under the latter strategy, Francis indicated that as more companies develop greater efficiencies and head towards world standards, there would be a concentrated move to influence a demand shift within the import-dependent tourism sector, for example, to seek markets in Jamaica.

It speaks to the revised focus that Jampro has, as the lynch pin between the policymakers and the private sector. “We’re a more neutral agency,” said Matalon.

The 2010 plan seems to imply a subtle strategic shift in the National Industrial Policy (NIP) that Prime Minister P J Patterson said in April his Administration was holding to steadfastly.

The NIP, crafted in the mid-1990s, had promised economic growth of 3.5 to six per cent in the early years, and 7.5 per cent beyond 2000 in order to double per capita income by the year 2010. The period has been characterised instead by negative or negligible growth.

Aside from the financial sector crash, the policy’s main failing seemed to have been the social partnership it was crafted on, those talks having broken down from early in the process. The new plan seems to have a more focussed outlook.

The NIP had identified specific clusters for development based on local competencies, whereas Export 2010 looks specifically at world markets that are evolving and how companies can tap into them.

The companies that Jampro is working with are as diverse as the established food conglomerate Grace, Kennedy and Company; liquor-maker J Wray & Nephew; and the emergent Walker’s Wood spice maker which has grown from cottage industry to exporter.

But the agency is also working with sectors like the ports, and is a participant in the development of a ‘Port Community System’ that is attempting to benchmark Kingston off super-efficient Singapore.

Singapore, which operates one of the busiest ports in the world, has developed its infrastructure to the point where it can strip down and process a ship in two hours.

In Jamaica, it takes three days, said Francis.

The EU has put 20 million euro into the PSDP programme, under the Ninth Export Development Fund.