Trade office wants more exports from SMEs

THE Trade Office in Papua New Guinea wants to encourage more exports of agricultural produce by small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs), an official says.
National Trade Office acting chief trade officer Richard Yakam said import substitution was one of its main programme.
“The Covid-19 has disrupted trade and investment across the globe and we are looking more at SME exports as import substitution is one of our aims,” he said.
Yakam said the office wanted to encourage exports by SMEs.
“Ours is to promote more export, promote more SMEs, especially those in the agriculture sector, the niche markets, those with a comparative advantage,” he said.
Yakam said the office was targeting one or two commodities in its initiative.
“Because of the limited capacity that we have in terms of finance, we want to do it commodity by commodity, so now we are looking at coffee and vanilla,” he said.
Yakam said the initiative would require funding which was, so far, inadequate.
“We have identified several SMEs, those who have the potential, but it’s the funding,” he said.
“We are a new office, we’ve just been established this year, the Department of Treasury gave us K3 million, and that is for staff salaries, operations and administration.”