Honourable Minister of Tourism, Industry and Commerce of Guyana, Manniram Prashad; Deputy Secretary-General, Ambassador Lolita Applewhaite; our Chairman for this Roundtable; Madame President of the Caribbean Association of Small and Medium Enterprises, Senator Sandra Husbands of Barbados; Other Distinguished Guests; Ladies and Gentlemen,

Welcome to this our Second Roundtable on Small and Medium Enterprises being held here at our Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Headquarters. For those of you visiting us in these surroundings for the first time, a special welcome and we hope that the physical surroundings help to provide the relaxed but focused ambience for the successful deliberations over the next two days.

The Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Sector is, as you know, vital to the economic and social development of our economies. The contribution that is made to the respective GDPs of our Region is significant. So too is the employment creation which is particularly important, given our constrained public expenditure and the threat of the alternative but less desirable income sources for our youth.

We at CARICOM recognize the need to maintain priority attention to this Sector. Since our last Roundtable about three years ago, other institutions within the CARICOM Region have also demonstrated their recognition of the need for keeping SMEs high on our agenda. Training Seminars have been held, Conferences on the issues affecting SMEs have benefited from the research and experience of other countries and, to date, I think it safe to say that general awareness of Best Practices and a greater sense of what can be achieved prevails.

Advances at the regional level have included responses to some of the concrete recommendations coming out of the last Roundtable. Of note must be the CARICOM Trade Facilitation Fund initiated by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago to assist the Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises throughout the CARICOM Region, and the Enterprise Development Scheme of the Caribbean Development Bank. There have also been a number of national initiatives in the area that range from the development of specific legislation and, in this regard, we would want to complement the Guyana Government in taking this pioneering step, to the creation of Entrepreneurial Centres and Bureaux for assistance to the Sector.

The challenges, however, have not become any less. For our part at the Secretariat, we have been attempting to mainstream the SME Sector into our Work Programmes as far as is possible. Apart from its location within the Industrial Development Sub-programme, where the treatment of the SMEs has traditionally resided, and where initiatives such as a Regional Incubation Centre for Entrepreneurs would have been born, we have also identified for special consideration the incidence of small farmers within Agriculture, and the contribution of the craft and tourism-related service businesses within the Tourism Industry.

We are also working along with our Statistical Unit to beef up the collection of the statistical data which is so necessary to better understand the SME Sector and to enhance our ability to have informed decision making so that the Sector realises its great potential.

The coming into being of the Single Market and Economy, the opportunities of which will be expanded on in the sessions today and tomorrow, has further underscored our reliance on the innovative and creative nature of the entrepreneur. Clearly, the supportive institutions now required will have to accommodate possible cross-border activity such as mergers and joint ventures, while the scope for businesses has concomitantly widened, both in range and depth. Our Banking and Financial systems, our Transport and Communication systems, and our Public Sector services such as Customs, will have to respond to this demand from the Business Sector.

This too, we at CARICOM, anticipate. As a first step we are exploring what new types of legislation may be required to be put in place to facilitate the business expansion in the presence of slow or capacity-limited Public Sector reaction. Such legislation, for example, that will enable the Private Sector to undertake new and creative activity as well as make inroads into the traditionally held Public Sector activity through facilitative mechanisms such as Public/Private Sector Partnerships.

There is no doubt that there is still a lot of work to be done. In this regard, we welcome the recently formed Caribbean Association of Small and Medium Enterprises (CASME) which brings an added institutional strength to our mission to enable and support the Region’s SMEs. We are always pleased by such initiatives and would like to assure you that we intend to pursue this collaboration demonstrated today in our co-hosting of this Roundtable.

In the final analysis, it is the active stakeholders, you, who represent the producers and service providers, you, who are involved in the day-to-day operations of the small, the very small, and the medium-sized businesses who must chart the course and the way ahead.

We hope that this Roundtable will allow some more fine-tuning of the road-maps and we wish for a pleasant and productive meeting.

Thank you.