The 43-year bedfellows of Britain and the European Union (EU) have fallen out. Anglophiles everywhere are shocked and dismayed at the demise of the Great Lady.

Global stock markets are in free fall as the speculators comprehend the implications of the banking and trade fallout which is to come. The sitting British Prime Minister David Cameron has resigned, senior political officials are vacating their positions right and left.

The Queen and her court clutch their proverbial pearls and swoon from fear of a Scottish secession, and rumours swirl of Northern Ireland’s intention to separate from the United Kingdom in the wake of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union; the rest of the kingdom will not be united and wish to stay with the EU.

The fallout is indeed bloody, the likes of which we hope to never see in this lifetime again. Many small countries, like Jamaica, believe this may be a good thing for the Commonwealth, but as the Commonwealth expects to reattach itself to The Queen’s apron strings, they will find that first they must navigate the blurred legal obligations to the EU, as well as renegotiate their trade relationships, funding and supply chains of exports into the EU.

The cost of setting up boards, councils or consultants to navigate these bundles of confusing trade relations will no doubt add a strain to already burdened financial coffers. All of this, however, will happen only after the UK formally disengages from the EU and rewrites new trade deals with those they favour.

When it comes to trade and alignments, the Commonwealth nations, such as Jamaica, in a new globalised world, will find that the UK — if it will still be called that — will focus on trading with the United States first. The partnerships and alignments of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will override any Commonwealth partnership and the US will seek to absorb the UK into the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

The United States, under a Donald Trump, will become more insular and seek to further cut out all trade partnerships from NAFTA, Pacific partnerships, and Caribbean Community partnerships will all be dammed — but that’s a November scenario.

As it is now, the Caribbean and African nations who have come to be dependent on EU aid and trade, the majority of which comes from the United Kingdom’s involvement in the EU, will feel the pain first, fastest, and worst, but do they really have to? Do we really have to go down with the ship, or is there another way? What about the contingency plans? What do Caribbean and African nations in the Commonwealth have in place to offset the broken ties in trade and the hyperinflation that will most certainly follow?

The writing on the wall is in Chinese

What contingency plan, you say? China, of course!

Let’s take the subject at hand. Jamaica, for example, is uniquely positioned to take up trade partnerships with China more than any other country in the western hemisphere. We are China’s number one trading partner in the English-speaking Caribbean, China Construction Communications Company is to begin building its Caribbean hub in Kingston. China Harbour Engineering Company has been investing heavily in infrastructure of highways, hubs, and all that is necessary to trade in an effort to cement Jamaica’s place in China’s One Belt, One Road initiative initiative.

China’s technology giant, Huawei, has selected Jamaica as a part of its technology roadshow; the Panama Canal has expanded, allowing goods to be traded cheaper and faster from the Caribbean and China. Shipping giant from France, CMA-CGM, has planted its flag in Kingston Container Terminal and at least two other shippers are now prepared to take cargo into China from the Caribbean. And last, but not least, Jamaica has the only cross-border e-commerce platform designed to import commodities into China from the Caribbean and Africa.

Yes! If Jamaican commodity producers decided tomorrow morning to seek out Chinese markets for their businesses, meanwhile everyone else in the entire world is losing their economic shirts in the Brexit, Jamaica is already uniquely positioned to not just find new markets, but also to grow in spite of language barriers.

But Jamaica is not like that, Jamaica is not a place for “dynamic” actions and exercising of one’s visions, especially if you are not of the European persuasion. You are more likely to be taken for granted, kicked into a corner, victimised by cliquishness and overlooked despite your successes and achievements.

Case in point is our cross-border e-commerce platform called Proudli Technologies Limited (PTL). We are a registered company in Jamaica and the United States that has been working on bilateral trade between China and Jamaica since 2013. We provide services such as sourcing from China and Chinese market entry for commodity producers. We are headquartered in Kingston to provide opportunities to Jamaican producers, as commodities such as pork in the United States contain substances such as ractopamine, which appear on China’s banned substances list. Jamaican pork, beef and poultry producers can supply a high demand market with high-quality produce that cannot be filled by the United States.

To us, Jamaica was fertile ground to prove our business model before expanding into the African continent. In addition, the Chinese Government has also made tremendous strides in cross-border e-commerce trade and allows smooth transition of goods in transit through bonded warehouses in China. This makes trading into Africa and the Caribbean via China the most cost-effective alternative and opens a treasure chest of opportunities.

No pick-up

To this end, from 2014 to date, PTL has solicited endorsements and partnerships from Jamaica Chamber of Commerce, Jamaica Manufacturers’ Association, the Jamaica Exporters’ Association, Things Jamaican, Rural Agricultural Development Authority, JAMPRO, and other private entities, all to no avail.

We have diligently requested meetings with minister without portfolio in the Office of the Prime Minister Daryl Vaz to seek out endorsement for our project and events, yet neither e-mail nor phone calls have been returned from his office. We were also waved away like a bothersome fly after politely introducing ourselves to the Minister of Industry and Commerce Karl Samuda at a recent event.

We decided to turn our attentions to the producers themselves in the hopes that they would see the value and opportunity in our services, and so we began to work assiduously with Jamaican producers to prepare them for Chinese market entry. We created customised presentations with strategic market entry into specific areas for each category of products to leading companies with expansion potential conveying the opportunity to enter the Chinese market through market research, consumer purchasing habits, Chinese trade show representation, label translation services, China quarantine and Customs submissions, importer and distributor matching, and e-commerce representation to demonstrate how they can take advantage of the Chinese invasion, offset hyperinflation, and fill a high demand food need to the luxury food market, but after all that work, neither pork, poultry, water, nor nutraceuticals from Jamaica has engaged us.

Nevertheless , we persevered under the understanding that Jamaica is not the only country in the Caribbean and we had the entire African continent to look forward to. We knew that in the long run we would have the last laugh, and handicapping a young entrepreneur is one of the underbelly hallmarks of Jamaica business practices. Despite what is published in the papers, the old guards only make room for relatives, friends and political party diehards.

I had to recall to myself that this is the same Jamaica where glass bottles of one soda company were collected and ground up by their competitors to put them under. This here Jamaica is still the place where green bananas to make banana chips were bought from the supplier of one competitor and buried underground to put the other out of business.

We took heart in the solidness of our plan, because though it is true that the Chinese markets have slowed, the Chinese trade is still growing at a pace faster than other traditional markets, and the demand for quality commodities has not disappeared because China still has heavy pollution in water that has hampered their agricultural demands.

Underfunded and undaunted

Our vision was to export high-quality commodities into China, grow our existing industries, expand our factories, hire more Jamaicans, and balance the economy through trade. As a start-up tech company, we are mostly self-funded with a handful of family and well-wishers. We, indeed, have found that Jamaica is extremely archaic when it comes to equity lending. We have sought loans with what we consider ironclad financial projections, but alas, we were bitterly rejected by the traditional financial institutions. Even opening a bank account in Jamaica was the mental equivalent of having all your teeth pulled out at the same time. No wonder so many businesses do not have bank accounts.

Unable to get a traditional loan, we approached other financial institutions to help privately raise funds and, again, we were rebuffed and diverted to join a local entrepreneurs’ group at the Branson Center for Entrepreneurship, even though we have already successfully completed technology incubation at Oasis500 in Amman, Jordan; favourited at Unicorn events in Beijing, Zhengzhou and Shanghai, China; and the CEO possesses 16 years of business development and strategic business planning in global travel and tourism.

Our goal is to stay upright in the hopes that Jamaica will one day wake up to the realities of trading into China/Africa. We were baffled that Jamaica, though a princess, wears tattered garments, with the worst GDP and PPP in the entire Caribbean — save for Haiti, who has just joined the African Union. The Economist’s Schumpeter column, dated on May 16, 2016, said Jamaica’s private sector must become more dynamic and less cliquish, but old habits die hard.

Producers remain unaware of opportunities to trading into China. What’s more, we have realised that our greatest enemy is ignorance, as we spent more time educating producers to strategic global market opportunities rather than selling our business. We thought, then, that perhaps the thing to do is to take China to Jamaica.

We used our skills in global event planning to formulate an event to inform, educate and expose Caribbean, African and Canadian producers to the opportunities that exist to trading into China. To work we went and designed such an event for November 2016. We engaged three hotels in Montego Bay, blocked the Montego Bay Convention Centre for three days as we expected to fill 600 hotel rooms, attract 3,000 attendees and sponsors from Canada, China and the Caribbean. We picked up a major Canadian bank as a sponsor and we were on our way, until Jamaican crime bit us in the britches.

One of our expected sponsors withdrew the day after the Canadian Government issued a travel advisory for Jamaica, due to the murder of a tourist.

However, we are keeping our eyes on the goal, staying positive, and working on the dream, day in and day out. We hope that Jamaica, with all its ills, woes, crime, a strangling economy, devalued currency, over-inflation, unemployment, and debt will wake to the opportunity of better.

Hopefully, the British exit from the European Union will do for Jamaica what we at PTL could not do: Wake them up!

Renae Bruce-Miller is CEO of Proudli Technologies Limited. Send comments to the Observer or renaebm@gmail.com.