Belize has promised to unveil by next month's summit of CARICOM leaders a programme for dismantling its special tariff on imports, which Jamaica complains keeps its beer out of the Central American country.

Senior Jamaican trade officials were unavailable yesterday for comment on Belize's latest proposal for its Revenue Replacement Duty (RRD), a long-standing contentious matter within CARICOM, against which Jamaica's foreign trade minister, Dr Ken Baugh, hit out at last month's meeting in Guyana of the community's committee on trade and economic development (COTED).

Baugh had aired Jamaica's frustration over Belize's frequently missed deadlines for removing the special tariff, which can add up to nine per cent in additional duties on the cost of imports.

Enjoying privileges

In return, Jamaica, and CARICOM generally, received an undertaking from Belize, that it would report at the July 4 summit of leaders on its moves at "implementing a treaty compatible revenue measure" that would address the country's fiscal issues and consistent with the privileges it enjoys under Article 164 of the CARICOM treaty.

Trade officials take the undertaking to mean that any tariff measure related to additional imports from CARICOM would similarly apply to domestically produced goods.

What was not immediately clear, was how this move would impact the waiver that was provided by COTED under Article 164, which allows CARICOM's lesser deve-loped countries to be granted, for a specific periods, waivers of the community's rules of origin regulations "to promote the deve-lopment of an industry".

There is a view, some trade sources suggest, that Belize abused the terms and conditions under which it was allowed to suspend the rules of origin, creating the basis of the spat with Jamaica. The waiver is to expire in 2011.

Although Belize will report to CARICOM as a whole on its programme, Jamaican business sources say that the Belizean government has undertaken to keep Kingston constantly informed on the progress of its efforts.

However, Kingston says that at the Guyana COTED meeting other trade ministers had emphasised to Belize that it was their obligation to remove the RRD extended to all products produced in CARICOM.

"That admonition found its way into the formal internal report of the meeting," explained a source.

business@gleanerjm.com