(CARICOM Secretariat, Turkeyen, Greater Georgetown, Guyana) The Twenty-Fifth Meeting of the Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED) opens in Georgetown on Friday 25 January with a packed agenda that includes recommendations from the technical team which earlier this week considered poverty and rising cost of living in the Region.

The two-day meeting will be held at the Buddy’s International Hotel, Providence, East Bank Demerara.

Poverty and the rising cost of living was one of the agenda items at the Twelfth Special Meeting of Heads of State and Government of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) in December 2008. At that meeting in Georgetown on 7 December 2007 at the Guyana International Convention Centre, Liliendaal, Heads of Government agreed that the Common External Tariff (CET) was the most appropriate instrument for an intervention at the Community level to address the issue of the rising cost of living. A Technical Team was subsequently established to review a set of commodities which have a significant weight in the Consumer Price Index, are not significantly produced or have a close substitute in the Region, and which attract a CET.

The COTED was also mandated to make a decision on the reduction or removal of the CET from those commodities as early as 31 January 2008.

On Monday 21 January 2008 at the Buddy’s International Hotel, a meeting of the Technical Team on the Rising Cost of Living was convened and proposals were made for the suspension of the CET for certain items.

Another key agenda item of that meeting was the presentation and discussion of the Study of the Escalating Cost of Living and Poverty in the Caribbean: Mobilising Collective Response at the Regional level.

Matters relating to the implementation of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME), including the recently launched CARICOM Competition Commission; Trade in Goods; External Trade; and Services are also agenda items of the COTED meeting. Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as a catalyst for Development, and the status of the establishment of National and Regional Services Coalitions will be dealt with under the Services agenda item.