The coun­try, not just the Gov­ern­ment and the Op­po­si­tion, needs to fo­cus on the chal­lenges which face Trinidad and To­ba­go in the im­me­di­ate fu­ture. And those chal­lenges have not on­ly to do with the threat of war po­ten­tial­ly ex­plod­ing sev­en miles from our shores, but as rel­e­vant, the fo­cus must turn se­ri­ous­ly to the fis­cal fi­nanc­ing, eco­nom­ic growth and de­vel­op­ment chal­lenges which are in our path.

Nowhere on the hori­zon are there ob­vi­ous and eas­i­ly achiev­able so­lu­tions to meet the day-to-day, month-to-month needs of the econ­o­my and so­ci­ety. The sal­va­tion over the last 50 years has been the rise in en­er­gy prices stim­u­lat­ed by fac­tors out­side of our do­ing and con­trol. The fact is that we can­not con­tin­ue to be de­pen­dent on the boom cy­cles, as they have in­evitably led to the bust pe­ri­ods which leave the econ­o­my ex­posed and vul­ner­a­ble, un­trans­formed from its orig­i­nal state.

Dur­ing such pe­ri­ods, we tend to make as if the in­flow of hard cur­ren­cy from en­er­gy to spend on oth­er parts of the econ­o­my is a per­ma­nent state. How­ev­er, we must now act through an un­der­stand­ing that the boom pe­ri­ods are fleet­ing. What has to be done dur­ing times of plen­ty is to wise­ly utilise the flow of hard cur­ren­cy to trans­form the econ­o­my to a state of greater sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

Re­al­is­ti­cal­ly, we are not in such a pe­ri­od of high re­turns from our ex­ports; more­over, we are dip­ping in­to the bot­tom of the bar­rel with­out the cer­tain­ty that new sources of oil and gas will be made com­mer­cial and vi­able in the im­me­di­ate, even the medi­um term.

The fact re­mains that no one can pre­dict the fu­ture. The cur­rent eco­nom­ic and fi­nan­cial chal­lenges now re­quire that we move for­ward from the de­pen­dence on an­oth­er en­er­gy boom cy­cle, and that is even if new life is in­ject­ed in­to the Drag­on gas arrange­ment. Cit­i­zens thus have to face the re­al­i­ty that the de­vel­op­ment of a pro­duc­tion base which can be trans­for­ma­tive, re­silient and de­pen­dent on our en­tre­pre­neur­ial ef­forts can be es­tab­lished.

Lead­ing that ef­fort must be a gov­ern­ment which un­der­stands and ac­knowl­edges the chal­lenges, the con­di­tions of the present and the kinds of in­ven­tive plan­ning and de­vel­op­ment need­ed to in­duce and sup­port an emerg­ing econ­o­my. In this ef­fort, the ex­ist­ing man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, which has done a good job in its ex­ports to our im­me­di­ate ex­ter­nal en­vi­ron­ment, Cari­com, has to be­gin bit­ing large chunks out of the present con­sump­tion of im­ports.

One el­e­ment of the Cari­com Sin­gle Mar­ket and Econ­o­my re­quires a com­bi­na­tion of the re­sources of the re­gion, hu­man, en­tre­pre­neur­ial vi­sion and ca­pac­i­ty and fi­nan­cial re­sources to be har­monised to pur­sue the ex­ter­nal mar­kets and for im­port re­place­ment.

The ef­fort at de­vel­op­ing and ex­pand­ing en­tre­pre­neur­ship has to start from pri­ma­ry school up to the ter­tiary lev­els of grad­u­ate and post­grad­u­ate ed­u­ca­tion. From our learn­ing in­sti­tu­tions, grad­u­ates must emerge with ideas and skills to cre­ate a new econ­o­my and so­ci­ety.

The en­tire so­ci­ety must ap­pre­ci­ate the fact that the in­ter­na­tion­al econ­o­my of the present is an un­for­giv­ing one. This is be­cause the world is at the point of a pos­si­ble pro­tec­tion­ist era. Sev­er­al of our own econ­o­mists have ad­vised that we ex­port or die; to do so in the cir­cum­stances of the present is the chal­lenge to be con­quered.