Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller yesterday identified five key issues which, she said, need to be resolved during the Caribbean Community’s (Caricom) inaugural joint prime ministerial sub-committee meetings on external trade negotiations and the single market economy.

The meetings, which started yesterday and end today in Montego Bay, follow on last week’s meeting of Caricom negotiators who hammered out what they saw as the key issues, namely:

. The strategic focus and direction of our negotiations in the context of the ACP/EU EPA;

. The nature of Caricom’s relationship with the wider Caribbean Basin community, including the Dominican Republic. More generally, we need to decide on how we wish to approach our bilateral relations;

. The implications of the resumption of the multi-lateral trade negotiations in the World Trade Organisation;

. The approach to the region’s export trade in sensitive primary commodities like banana and sugar; and

. Caricom’s approach to trade and economic relations with the United States and Canada.

Simpson Miller, who will chair the meeting on external trade negotiation beside Barbados’ prime minister, Owen Arthur – who will chair the meeting on Caricom’s single market and economy – said the twinning of the meetings would facilitate a greater likelihood of achieving Caricom’s objectives through closer collaboration.

“It brings together the discussions of our internal and our external efforts at fostering our development around one explicit regional development vision, and it provides a practical demonstration of the capacity and the flexibility of our institutional structures to adapt in the effort to achieve our common goal,” she said.

The outcome of the meetings will inform Caricom’s 18th intersessional heads of government meeting in St Vincent and the Grenadines next week.

It is expected that the need for a paradigm shift away from the traditional climate of patronisation in the form of trade and tariff benefits from Europe and the United States will be high on the agenda of that meeting, which will be chaired by the prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves.

Gonsalves, who also addressed yesterday’s opening of the meetings, said that it was imperative for the region to seek to build a modern competitive post-colonial economy which is advanced nationally and regionally.

“We can’t build this modern competitive post-colonial economy with a ramshackle set of institutional arrangements,” he said. “We can’t build those institutions in the post-colonial era with a debilitating set of colonial ideas.”

His speech reiterated the point made earlier by Arthur who spoke of the importance of being ready for 2008 when it would be time to redefine the region’s trade relationship with the rest of the world.