Environmental Action
Coming to Hawaii
I was overjoyed at President Obama’s announcement that the 2011 APEC Summit would be in Hawaii, his home state – and have been doing a lot of thinking about ways in which Hawaii can take advantage of having APEC here (other than the obvious publicity of being the host – and filling 20,000 hotel rooms). I really want to suss out how to use APEC to encourage more Hawaii companies to go international. Too many of our small companies think that “exporting” means selling in California! If any of you have ideas, please share them with me.
While thinking about APEC, I happened on a promising new website the APEC secretariat has put together about trade in environmental goods and services (EGS, they call the sector). Any of you in EGS or related businesses should take a look at egs.apec.org. The site functions as a portal to environmental laws and regulations of all the APEC member states, has considerable market research and makes available official reports that would be otherwise very difficult to find.
The EGS site is still being developed and has much room for improvement. The project information is a bit thin and general, but I suppose that depends on what the APEC governments are giving the secretariat. And I wasn’t able to use the APEC tariff database. Don’t know if that is a temporary glitch, or a bigger problem.
The most disappointing part of the site is the EGS business directory, very sparsely populated. It contains only about three dozen environmental companies, mostly from Australia, though some come from Singapore, Canada and China. Surely APEC’s 21 members can muster a few more firms in this industry! Of course, this is also an opportunity: get your company listed before everybody else does it. It’s a good site and you don’t know which decision makers are going to see it. Time for action.
Unless something catches my wandering eye, I may not post for a day or so. Thursday is Thanksgiving Day in America, a good time to relax with family and friends, and to ponder all sorts of things we should be thankful for. Besides, good wine and turkey on the grill make me sleepy.
