Caribbean Agrifood Business Session n°3

Post-COVID-19 : Building stronger linkages between agriculture and tourism: the key role of SMEs and businesses

It is essential that MSMEs are working closely with the public sector and other partners to apply strict health & safety standards across industries and plan the costs associated to this.

Rebuilding investor and consumer confidence will be essential for the tourism sector. It will require monitoring the evolution of the demand, anticipating new market trends and demands, strengthening the economic, social and environmental sustainability through increased resilience and fairer sharing of benefits. Building better forward a greener and more inclusive development of the sector will be critical. A fairer sharing of value across actors is also needed, especially on the improvement of living and working conditions of local workers and rural communities.

MSMEs have a key role in improving quality and availability of local food and ensuring high safety and quality standards. Health & safety are paramount in this new post-COVID-19 era. MSMESs and businesses will have to ensure that such protocols are also applied by their suppliers, service providers and partners that it brings trust across the value chain. Traceability systems will also be more important for consumers, very more interested by healthy choices.

In promoting domestic tourism, and destinations close to home, rural areas and emerging new destinations will need increased investment in digital and physical infrastructure. Increased investments will also be needed in more remote areas, as well as efforts needed to promote the domestic and regional market, test innovations, marketing and promotional activities…

Promote public-private partnerships and multistakeholder collaboration between governmental institutions, MSMEs and service providers and rural communities which are inclusive which address the expectations of tourists. Sharing widely best practices will be particularly useful to regain confidence. Hence the key role for MSMEs to communicate and increase their online presence.