9 From left, David Jessop - Caribbean Council with Karen Thomas - Trade and Buisness Facilitator Trinidad & Tobago & Shaun Clarke - Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.
There is an old saying that you wait ages for a London bus and then two or even three come along at once. It is not an expression, as far as I am aware, that has ever been applied to policy statements affecting U.K.-Caribbean relations.
However, in the space of just 14 days four documents have appeared that will, in one or another way, guide future relations between a stand-alone Britain and the Anglophone Caribbean.
Asif Ahmad,
British High
Commissioner to
Jamaica.
Last week, I listened to an interview with the British High Commissioner to Jamaica H.E. Asif Ahmad. He was talking about the potential for increasing trade between Jamaica and the United Kingdom (UK) in goods and services. Of course, on January 1, 2021, whether or not the UK has concluded a trade agreement with the European Union (EU), the transition period will be over and the UK fully exits the EU. This means that the Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM)-UK Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), the trade agreement, will take effect.
In my article of June 24, I wrote about the Caribbean’s Trade with Europe (UK and EU) moving into a new era. That era begins come January. In this article, I highlighted the decline in trade between the UK and the Caribbean with the main traders now being the Dominican Republic and Trinidad and Tobago. The Caribbean had moved from having a trade surplus to a deficit. Of course, with the 2020 COVID-19 i