In Panama, the Cortizo administration has announced that it does not plan to sign new trade agreements, as what the country currently needs is to “strengthen its exporters.”
Representatives of the Ministry of Commerce and Industries informed that until the exportable offer of Panama is strengthened, they will begin to advance in the negotiation of commercial treaties with other countries.
Juan Carlos Sosa, Vice Minister of Foreign Trade, explained to Prensa.com that “… Before moving forward and talking about treaties, we really need to prepare our exporters, have well-certified plants and keep looking for those business opportunities for Panamanian products.”
With this decision, the Free Trade Agreement negotiations with China, which reached the fifth round, would be blocked.
See “Panama – China FTA: Fifth Round of Negotiations”
In this regard, Sosa said that “… Panama will continue to work on achieving export protocols to the Asian country of new processing plants for beef, pork, chicken and shrimp. Relations with China are excellent and besides export we are promoting technology and logistics projects. The trade issue with China has not stopped, but the issue of the FTA will be seen little by little.”
Wei Qiang, China’s ambassador to Panama, said in mid-September that the Asian country is still interested in negotiating a high-level free trade agreement.
If the idea is well implemented it is correct. But Panama has to look at being competitive and with an overall system that is 20% as efficient as the highly efficient systems of the world it has a long way to go. It should look at countries like Estonia and a number of others where tasks that take 3 days and costs hundreds or thousands of in fees take 15 min and have minimal costs. This allows businesses to invest in competitive production of things to export rather than useless paper work. Often the export processes in Panama can be 30% or more of the cost of the product, it should be less than 1% of the cost of the product. But is correct Panama needs to focus on being competitive in production of products its as it has a lot of potential.