3rd Caribbean Agribusiness Forum

3rd CARIBBEAN AGRIBUSINESS FORUM

Radisson Hotel-Port Of Spain-Trinidad & Tobago

29-30th January 2017

THEME–STRENGTHENING THE CARIBBEAN AGRIBUSINESS SECTOR AND EXPANDING MARKETS THROUGH SMEs BUSINESSS DEVELOPMENT.

Background

The Caribbean Agribusiness Forum, is an annual event hosted by the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in collaboration with the Caribbean Agri-Business Association (CABA) and the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), aimed at providing a medium primarily for private sector stakeholders to “discuss and engage in business” that can have an early impact on investment, production and trade in the Region.

The previous Fora in 2014 and 2015 were largely focussed on building knowledge and sharing success stories amongst agribusiness. This year’s Forum will focus on directly facilitating production and trade and will be a “Business Meeting” involving specific SME firms that have been trained in HACCP certification, that are working under the CABA sponsored “Collective Regional Export Strategy’.

The strategy is aimed at facilitating SME’s to act collectively in attacking markets and in procurement of inputs and services. A critical part of the strategy is the plan to have the firms market and promote some of their products under a common regional “Brand or Mark” and to share the high cost of servicing export markets and brand building. These products will be marketed through the Caribbean Agri-Business Export Company (CABEXCO) which has been established for this purpose.

The forum will bring together the firms and selected buyers for the following specific purposes:

1. Discuss their experience with the CABA sponsored, EU/TBT funded, HACCP Certification Programme for the selected 10 firms and the way forward after achieving certification.
2. Showcase and have buyers from regional and extra–regional markets evaluate 2 of each firm’s most promising export product and seek buyer commitments to in assisting in getting them into export markets.
3. Discuss and agree on a strategic plan for CABEXCO including the products selected for export.
4. Officially launched CABEXCO.

Goal:

To develop a strategy for collective exports of Caribbean produced primary and value-added food products with a special focus on herbs and spices and staples by SMEs.

Objectives:

• Assessing the certification support programme for the 10 SMEs and next steps to export.

• Identifying new market opportunities in tourism and export markets for the SMEs.

• Development of a strategy for collective export by the SME’s

Program:     https://brusselsbriefings.net/past-briefings/building-resilience-of-sids-through-trade-agribusiness/3rd-caribbean-agribusiness-forum/