Barbados and China sign visa waiver agreement

Barbados and China Tuesday signed a visa waiver agreement that Bridgetown said would allow for increased cooperation between the two countries.  Foreign Affairs and Foreign and Foreign Trade Minister, Maxine McClean, said the Mutual Visa Abolition Agreement with China will allow diplomatic, governmental and cultural personnel to negotiate viable opportunities for partnership and investment.

McClean told the local and Chinese officials that the signing of the agreement demonstrated government’s recognition of “facilitating exchanges and enhancing cooperation through travel”. McClean also said, “I know that Ambassador Wang Ke, has lobbied for a more expeditious system of processing visas to better able Chinese citizens to travel on ordinary passports.”

Furthermore, she added, “I concur that it is in Barbados’ interest to ensure that this happens, all the more so, as there is a boom in leisure travel by Chinese, with some 100 million tourists traveling abroad annually and, in fact, a mere 0.25 percent or 250 000 persons within that market would revitalize and transform the tourism landscape.”

McClean then  acknowledged that for the last 37 years there was a rich bilateral relationship between Barbados and China and pointed out that the areas of cooperation between the two countries had been diverse, with some 21 government agreements on economic and technical agreements signed.

These agreements include the signing of an economic and technical agreement and three banking agreements on accounting procedures to the tune of BDS $16 million (One BDS dollar=US$0.50 cents).   The Foreign Minister said the Freundel Stuart government had made considerable progress in utilizing the grant funds provided by China with the submission of 11 potential projects in areas such as agriculture, renewable energy and infrastructural development.

She said that Barbados had already started the process of fine-tuning its system for issuing visas for Chinese ordinary passport holders.  McClean then concluded, “Today is but one more step in what I anticipate will be a long and fruitful journey which ought to serve as a model of 21st Century cooperation for countries of vastly different geographical sizes, populations and resource endowments.”

Source: Caribbean360