The current challenges and possible solutions to supply chains were highlighted during day one of the Global Supply Chain Forum (GSCF).
Minister of Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade, Kerrie Symmonds, and United Nations Trade and Development (UNCTAD) Secretary-General, Rebeca Grynspan, pointed the way forward during the high-level session “Setting the Scene – Global Supply Chain Challenges and Solutions”.
Minister Symmonds noted that a few years ago the topic of supply chains was the focus of entities and persons involved in the intricacies of policymaking, commerce, and trade.
He said now, it is a global topic of critical importance as the efficient functioning of supply chains impacts not only economies but also the direct daily lives of human beings, concerning the provision of food.
The Minister stated that challenges, such as the climate crisis, the war between Ukraine and Russia, lower water levels at the Panama Canal and difficulty in accessing the regular routes, have inflated the costs of shipping goods and these challenges must be addressed in a way that factor in small island developing states (SIDS) and their development.
“There’s a deep-seated interest that we (SIDS) have in these matters which transcends the purely economic. The fact of the matter is that there is also the reality that it is not just simply good enough to say that there is a supply chain, the quality of the supply chain can never be measured simply by its existence; it has to be tested in terms of its efficiency, in terms of its adequacy, and quite frankly, also in terms of its resilience.”
“And that is what we hope that this convocation will be able to do during the course of the next few days, to test the resilience and the adequacy and the efficiency of the global supply chain…I am sanguine in the knowledge that perhaps that which has been missing has been the voice and the perspective of the small island developing states. In all of these discussions, we have had from time immemorial on global supply chains, I think we may have overlooked the peculiar impact that they have on small island developing states. Our reality is not the reality of the North Atlantic and the industrialised countries,” Minister Symmonds stressed.
Grynspan said the challenges being faced are complex, multifaceted, and interconnected, “spanning legal, geopolitical and environmental spheres”. She suggested that one of the solutions is to address regulations in a multilateral way.
“The problem we face, right now, is not that we don’t have regulation; it is that we have fragmented regulation. We have a lot of norms and standards that compete with each other…”
“Because many of these norms and standards have not been agreed in a multilateral setting. And so, in some way, we need a rationale and a regulation that will be efficient in what it has to achieve, but everybody putting norms and standards doesn’t help. What we need to do is help small and medium-sized enterprises in the small countries and medium-sized countries. So, we need to look at this, and in a trade multilateral way,” the Secretary-General said.
The two officials also urged participants to be as candid as possible when sharing their experiences, diverse perspectives, and expertise because they go towards providing efficient and effective solutions to the way forward for a resilient future for the global supply chain.
“Let us seize this unprecedented opportunity and forge a new era of cooperation and innovation in the global supply chain. Let us leave a legacy of a more connected, prosperous, and sustainable world for generations to come,” Grynspan advised.
SOURCE: Barbados Government Information Service (BGIS).
