The executive director of the Caribbean Centre for Competitiveness (CCfC) arrives here on Monday to meet with key stakeholders in five agricultural sectors identified to benefit from value chain analysis.
The CCfC, a division of the University of the West Indies, has identified the Banana Accompanying Measures (BAM) initiative as an area in which it can collaborate with the Government and the European Union.
Indera Sagewan Alli, executive director of CCfC, will visit this country from July 1 to 3 to meet with key stakeholders in poultry, “Fair trade” bananas, small ruminants, fresh fruits and vegetables, and pig production.
Alli explained that the CCfC has examined the competitiveness tools available and has concentrated on clustering, global value chain analysis and innovation, which are inextricably linked in developing competitive sectors, a release siad.
More importantly, these are “applied” research techniques involving all key stakeholders in the entirety of the process from training to research and analysis to strategy development to implementation, which, for the CCfC, is what is required to address our countries’ development challenges, a release said.
Researchers at the CCfC are collating all the research available on these commodities to identify information gaps that would be important to carrying out proper value chain mapping and analysis and to ensure word done is not being replicated.
Alli said the CCfC has been established to work with regional governments and private sector to find solutions to diversification and competitiveness challenges.
Using a regional approach, the centre has paid to train academics and public sector technocrats from across the region, including St. Vincent and the Grenadines, in areas such as cluster mapping and global value chain analysis.
Alli said the region needs to aggressively move beyond talking about its problems to building competitive implementation strategies to convert potential opportunities into real jobs, revenue generation and national growth.