President Donald Trump of the United States announced sweeping tariffs on countries around the world on Wednesday including a 10% reciprocal tariff on The Bahamas and other countries in the Caribbean.
Minister of Economic Affairs, Sen. Hon. Michael Halkitis spoke with ZNS News on the issue of trade and tariffs. He said, “there’s a lot of uncertainty. We don’t know what will happen. The danger for us here is that some protracted and severe trade war leads to recession in the US which would impact us or even leads to a global recession. So we have to be aware. There’s very little we can do to impact circumstances but as I said before one of the important things we can do is prepare ourselves in terms of how we manage our economy, how we manage our finances to deal with any sort of fallout.”
After the United States imposed tariffs on Canada, China and Mexico earlier this year, the government announced an initiative to diversify our trading partners and seek new trade routes. Halkitis said, “the cost of living, for example, impacting The Bahamas so severely we have a trade diversification committee looking at ways to get good here more directly. So for example, you have good produced in Central or South America, the Caribbean, go up to Miami or Jacksonville or wherever and then come back down to The Bahamas. If we can get the very same thing directly here then you cut out the cost of all that intermediate shipping. So we’re looking at things like that.”
In a statement released in response to the latest round of tariffs imposed by the United States the government noted that The Bahamas currently maintains a trade deficit with the United States and that the country will engage its US counterparts and work collectively with CARICOM in response to the new tariffs.
