Raphael John-Lall

Mak­ing it eas­i­er for for­eign in­vestors to get busi­ness visas will make T&T and the rest of the re­gion more at­trac­tive, Ari­ad­na Perez, Di­rec­tor of Trade De­vel­op­ment, As­so­ci­a­tion of Caribbean States (ACS) said yes­ter­day.

"If you give visas to make it easy for busi­ness per­sons to come to T&T to in­vest, that is good for the coun­try. I do not think it is spe­cif­ic to T&T alone but to all the mem­ber states of the ACS. They have to come to­geth­er and think about what they can achieve to build and en­hance trade with each oth­er. This is im­por­tant for trade and in­vest­ment," she said.

Perez spoke to the me­dia yes­ter­day at a meet­ing of the Work­ing Group of Busi­ness Visas at the ACS head of­fice, St Clair. The meet­ing fa­cil­i­tat­ed di­a­logue among mem­ber states on pro­ce­dures and fa­cil­i­ties need­ed for ef­fec­tive and ex­pe­di­tious grant­i­ng of visas to busi­ness­peo­ple and in­vestors with­in the Caribbean re­gion. The meet­ing al­so con­sid­ered cri­te­ria for grant­i­ng visas, tak­ing in­to con­sid­er­a­tion is­sues like na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty.

"We want to en­hance trade among our coun­tries. The ACS is like an um­brel­la to in­te­grate the Latin coun­tries with the Caribbean coun­tries. The ma­jor chal­lenge is to find out the pro­mo­tion of our coun­tries is go­ing along with the se­cu­ri­ty and in­te­gra­tion of our coun­tries," she said.

Ibrahim Ab­dool, Re­search Of­fi­cer, Trade and De­vel­op­ment Unit, T&T Cham­ber of Com­merce, said the fo­rum was im­por­tant in shar­ing ideas and com­ing up with so­lu­tions for bet­ter trade and in­vest­ment in Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean.

Ab­dool said mem­ber states like Cu­ba are mak­ing great strides in open­ing up to for­eign in­vest­ment. "We are hop­ing that T&T will use some of the lessons of oth­er coun­tries and we in T&T could share what they are do­ing to en­sure that our busi­ness peo­ple can eas­i­ly work among dif­fer­ent economies to fur­ther de­vel­op trade," he said.