Amended GCT Act will kill manufacturing, jobs, JMA head says
KINGSTON, Jamaica—Head of the Jamaica Manufacturers’ Association (JMA), Brian Pengelly on Wednesday urged Jamaicans to support Brand Jamaica and to reject amendments to the GCT Act proposed by the Government.
Pengelly was speaking at the launch of the Buy Jamaican Public Education Campaign, held at the Rainforest Seafood Headquarters in Kingston.
The JMA president argued that Jamaicans do not buy into the idea of Brand Jamaica because they seldom think it affects them.
“Many times, the mindset when it comes to the Buy Jamaican Campaign by either consumers or corporate purchasing is that ‘it is not my problem, my business is doing good’, or ‘it does not affect me, I am going to buy what I want’. However, we need to look at the bigger picture as that is how we are going to play a role in correcting our economic issues,” he said.
Pengelly said that 70,000 Jamaicans are making a living off manufacturing, which is grave to the strength of the economy and which contributes 8.4 per cent to the GDP, US$772.5 million in export earnings and J$30 billion in taxes.
At the same time Pengelly said that the JMA was seriously concerned about the amendment to the GCT Act which government plans to introduce.
According to Pengelly, if passed, the Act will “effectively ensure the end of the manufacturing sector, put thousands of people out of work with a huge knock on effect on their families and convert [the sector] fully to an import dominated market that consumes huge amounts of FX that the Country does not have.”
He said that no logical reason exists to support the proposed actions of the Government which would see an increase in costs to consumers and a decline of investment in the country.
“We maintain that there is absolutely no practicality or sound business reasoning behind any of the points (put forward by the Government) that would encourage investment in Jamaica. They are purely focused on addressing revenue gaps for the Government and are also absolutely contrary to the rhetoric that has been presented since we entered the current IMF agreement about a growth strategy,” the JMA head said.
