A few years ago Port Authority of Jamaica’s (PAJ) Assistant Vice-President of Operations and Customer Relations, Gloria Henry, was expecting a miraculous resurgence of the once popular 807 Garment Industry to save the Montego Bay Free z one.
Three years later the miracle has happened, but not quite like she expected. Instead of an 807 resurgence, that experiment has given birth to a much more promising, lucrative and exciting product, Business Process Outsourcing (BPO), and the PAJ has been leading the way in creating the accelerator environment for its success.
Well, at least, that is the opinion of Henry, who insists that the PAJ gave birth to the idea of developing a local BPO sector, when it started in the Montego Bay Free Zone in 1985.
Henry, who was speaking at Mayberry Investments Limited’s (MIL) November Monthly Investment Forum at the Courtyard Marriott in New Kingston, noted that the free zone was actually created for the expansion of the 807 experiment from the Kingston Free Zone, but a decade later 807 hit a virtual sleeping policeman and the boom crashed, leaving a few optimists to continue searching for new markets.
Bear in mind that the expansion of the free zone apparel industry was a product of the relaxed relationship between Jamaica and the United States, which followed the election of the Edward Seaga-led Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) administration and Ronald Reagan’s ascendancy to the White House in the 1980.
After a rapid period of growth in the 1980s, however, the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI), which allowed the apparel to be assembled in Caribbean free zones from US made cloth easy access into the US market, on a bilateral basis, was upset by a post-Reagan move which favoured Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan, instead.
That forced the Jamaican government to start its campaigning to lure more US- textile and apparel distributors to the Caribbean and, eventually, more than 20,000 garment sector jobs were lost islandwide between the 1990s and early 2000 when the agreement folded.
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