Let’s do more business

WITH Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago appearing to have moved beyond the trade tensions that once strained their commercial relationship, the twin island republic’s High Commissioner Deborah Thomas-Felix wants to build on that progress by creating stronger business connections, encouraging investment, and opening up more opportunities for companies to enter each other’s markets. Thomas-Felix said, as Trinidad and Tobago’s high commissioner to Jamaica, her role is to identify opportunities on both sides and bring businesses and other stakeholders together, with the aim of turning both states’ improving relationship into greater commercial activity. “One of the things I want is to — and I spoke to your Government about it — I want us to have more trade missions.

We have a very strong relationship and I want to continue strengthening that relationship, not only in trade and culture and everything, [but] the mark that I leave should be a mark of strengthening and building the relationship that we have,” she said while speaking during a Jamaica Observer Press Club last Friday at the newspaper’s Beechwood Avenue, St Andrew, headquarters. Her comments come against a history of difficult trade relations between the two Caribbean countries, including complaints from Jamaican exporters about access to the Trinidad and Tobago market and a significant imbalance in merchandise trade. The two countries signed a memorandum of understanding in August 2022 establishing a Trade Complaints Mechanism intended to provide a channel for resolving trade-related problems.

More recently, however, both sides have been emphasising deeper commercial ties. In July 2025, Trinidad and Tobago’s Government said increasing private sector links between the countries were helping to strengthen bilateral and intra-regional trade, while officials committed to further deepening the partnership. Thomas-Felix said the shift is reflected in Jamaica’s growing presence in the Trinidad and Tobago market.

Figures provided to her, she said, showed a substantial increase in Jamaica’s reach between 2019 and 2025. So I would say that some of the issues before would not be issues now,” she said. The diplomat said Jamaica’s changing economic profile also crea…