Local entrepreneurs are being urged to export their products.
Parliamentary representative for Vieux Fort South, Dr Kenny D. Anthony, says many individuals have not understood how crucial it is.
“A lot of individuals [and] manufacturing businesses believe somehow, they can survive purely if they conquer the internal market, [ but] they do not even realise that if they themselves are not exporting… what they are doing is… to benefit from the persons who have brought in income from exporting their own goods and services,” Dr Anthony said at the Independence Business Expo in Vieux Fort on Friday.
“I would love to see the day that those three words would become the mantra of our businesses: “Export, export, export’,” he added.
For small and medium-sized businesses, exporting can mean an increase in sales and diversifying their customer base, ‘Four Turrets’, (a solutions-driven website) noted in an online post.
But whilst it offers opportunities for individuals to access a global market, it also comes with its own challenges: navigating international regulations, managing currency fluctuations, and facing stiff competition to name a few, as noted by ‘Four Turrets’.
For his part, Dr. Anthony observed that “The income comes in, is earned by those business places that export, and then of course it becomes available to the public at large by the wages that they pay and… the expenditure that they incur.”
He reiterated that “You cannot survive without the ability to earn the import/export income and that really has to be the key to the future of any country and we, I think, have to re-emphasise this message at every opportunity that we have.”
He also spoke on the importance of tourism in today’s economy.
“Years ago, the tourism industry was at the forefront of trying to convince everybody – from governments down to technocrats, that tourism was an export activity,” he stated.
Dr. Anthony recalls former Chairman of Sandals, Gordon “Butch” Stewart, “constantly preached that we have to re-seek the way we look at tourism and treat it as an export industry. A lot of economists had difficulty with that and perhaps the time is ripe to bring this issue back on the table so that people can understand that whether you have foreign exchange in this country heavily depends on whether you can earn your foreign exchange from that industry that we call tourism.”
“Of course, the average person does not appreciate that when they go into a bank and ask for foreign exchange, that while some of that foreign exchange will be remittances from abroad… capital from investors and so on, a lot of it will have to be from that export income that is earned so it is vital to our survival and to our livelihoods,” he added.
He encouraged Sunita-Daniel, Chief Executive Officer of Export Saint Lucia, “to take this to the other level to enhance the consciousness all the time of the average Saint Lucian to say to them that you need to export… not just for your own survival but for the survival of the country.”