KINGSTON: Dr Jeffery Hall (left), managing director of Jamaica Producers Group, and William Mahfood (centre), president of the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica, look on as Charles Johnston, chairman of Jamaica Producers Group, addresses a Gleaner Editors’ Forum on Jamaica’s logistics dream at the company’s Kingston offices yesterday.
Jamaican shipping and port interests say that inadequate facilitation poses the greatest threat to Jamaica’s emergence as a major logistics hub and warn that proposed amendments to the Customs Act, as currently framed, could entrench the problems.
A raft of private-sector groups, including the Private Sector Organisation of Jamaica (PSOJ), have put their concerns in writing to the Government, which should help to inform discussion of the bill by a joint select committee of Parliament, which begins its work today.
“You have a Customs law that is coming to Parliament after years … and it is not doing what it is supposed to do to create a logistics hub,” said Charles Johnston, a long-time shipping industry official and chairman of Jamaica Producers Group (JPG).
“Instead, it is increasing penalties and reasons for penalties,” Johnston told a Gleaner Editors’ Forum on the topic, which was hosted at the company’s North Street, Kingston, offices yesterday.
“We are not going in the direction of making the regime that is needed to make logistics work.”
The modernisation of Jamaica’s Customs law is among the major undertakings under Jamaica’s economic reform programme with the International Monetary Fund.
At the same time, the Simpson Miller administration has made transforming Jamaica into a logistics centre a key plank of its economic strategy.
The current amendments largely upgrade outdated penalties for breaches of the Customs laws, a focus which Jeffrey Hall, managing director of JPG and chairman of porting company Kingston Wharves, suggested reflected the tension that often arises with the Government’s need to collect taxes and do things that ultimately drive economic development.
Jamaica last year collected $12.9 billion in Customs revenue of the $384 billion in taxes collected by the State last year.
