PRIME Minister Bruce Golding wants, as a high priority, a development agenda to assist countries like Jamaica to benefit from trading opportunities that are going to be provided under the Economic Partnership Agenda (EPA), during the special meeting of CARIFORUM heads of government here in Jamaica.

The meeting is being held at the Half Moon Hotel in Montego Bay.

“It is going to be meaningless to us if we negotiate an agreement in which there are opportunities for trade, if we don’t have the capacity to generate the production of those goods and services, and that’s why the development component is so critical. It is one of the issues that we are going to be stressing,” the prime minister was quoted by JIS News.

Golding said the region also has to prepare itself for the conclusion of the Doha round, and that the needs and interest of developing countries has be at the heart of that work programme.

“Part of the challenge we face is the stress it places on our own institutional capacity to handle negotiations that are so highly complex, and to be negotiating in three, four, five different forums at the same time. It is difficult for small countries,” he said.

The prime minister also pointed out the need to redress the imbalance in the international trading systems and the consequent need for special and differential trading systems.

“The world cannot afford to approach the future on the basis that those countries that are prosperous, are on one side of the equator and can proceed to prosperity and countries that have not made it are to be left in the backwater of economic history,” said Golding.

He noted that Jamaica was in a peculiar position, being regarded as neither rich nor poor, “and sometimes we get peripheralised because we fall into this particular category, but the world has to become sensitised to the need for development to become global, and for all the countries of the world to be given the opportunity”.

Countries like Jamaica, added the prime minister, must be accorded special and differential treatment, “not only because we are behind, in terms of our status of development, but also because countries like ourselves provide a large significant market that is important in sustaining the world economy and economic activities”.