All pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ments, along with the pri­vate sec­tor, have paid lip ser­vice to di­ver­si­fy­ing the econ­o­my away from oil and nat­ur­al gas, ex­cept one, the ad­min­is­tra­tion of George Cham­bers.

In the mid-eight­ies, the Cham­bers ad­min­is­tra­tion em­barked on a Meet the Man­u­fac­tur­ers tour. The goals were these: im­port sub­sti­tu­tion; ex­tra-re­gion­al ex­ports; and di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion.

Im­port sub­sti­tu­tion was need­ed to save for­eign ex­change by man­u­fac­tur­ing lo­cal­ly, goods we im­port­ed. Ex­tra-re­gion­al ex­ports (out­side Cari­com) were re­quired to earn for­eign ex­change and cre­ate more jobs in the process; di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion was need­ed to re­place oil and nat­ur­al gas as our on­ly re­al means of earn­ing for­eign ex­change as they both are con­sid­ered wast­ing as­sets. In oth­er words they have shelf lives.

The idea was to pro­tect new start-up in­dus­tries from com­pe­ti­tion for a spec­i­fied pe­ri­od, ei­ther through in­creased tar­iffs on like im­ports or not grant­i­ng li­cens­es to im­port the said prod­ucts. This would have giv­en lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers breath­ing room to achieve the qual­i­ty and the economies of scale com­par­a­tive to their for­eign com­peti­tors.

Now that Moody's has iden­ti­fied lack of di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion as one of the rea­sons for down­grad­ing our cred­it rat­ing, the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion bo­gey­man is back in play–30 years lat­er.

Ger­ard John­son