The Tribune

By NATARIO McKENZIE

Tribune Business Reporter

nmckenzie@tribunemedia.net

The Bahamas has now adopted a total of 11 national standards with the addition of eight more yesterday, a Cabinet Minister explaining that their development was key to eliminating trade barriers for local businesses.

Hope Strachan, minister of financial services, described the introduction of the eight standards as a “milestone”, adding that they were benchmarked using international guidelines.

Those declared as national standards include: The labelling of prepackaged foods; labelling of tobacco products; specifications for grading and quality requirements for table eggs; specifications for poultry and poultry products; specifications for poultry feed and feed ingredients; specifications for cement; general requirements for the competence of testing and calibration laboratories; and requirements for quality and competence of medical laboratories.

“Trade, more particularly export trade, is critical to the development of our country and we must grasp every opportunity to increase our international trading opportunities,” said Mrs Strachan.

“Quality standards reduce those technical barriers to trade in terms of our producers being able to put their products out there on the international market and offer their goods for sale to any number of countries. This is how you actually develop a country.”

    The Standards Bureau, which was established as part of the Bahamas’ commitments to membership in the rules-based trading regimes of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), is designed to both protect consumers and facilitate trade.

Mrs Strachan said work towards the Bahamas becoming a full WTO member is ongoing.

“There isn’t a specific date that has been set for that particular process to be completed yet, but a lot of the work that we have been doing in the Ministry of Financial Services, particularly under our trade regime, is to create the environment of compliance with whatever standards and regulations the WTO sets for us to meet,” she added.

“A lot of what we are doing is also very much to comply with our obligations under the European Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA). We have found that a lot of the work that we do towards one also covered the other.”