It can­not be suf­fi­cient­ly re­port­ed and com­ment­ed up­on that un­less we, at this crit­i­cal point in the po­lit­i­cal econ­o­my and so­ci­ety, recog­nise that if we are to con­tin­ue spend­ing freely the for­eign ex­change from the Cen­tral Bank and com­mer­cial banks, then we have to con­struct an econ­o­my that earns the hard cur­ren­cy in large quan­ti­ties out­side of the en­er­gy sec­tor.

The re­spon­si­bil­i­ty for the in­abil­i­ty to solve this post-in­de­pen­dence prob­lem lies first with the in­ca­pac­i­ty of suc­ceed­ing gov­ern­ments to build the frame­work to make it very dif­fi­cult for those in­volved in un­nec­es­sary im­por­ta­tion to sur­vive and pros­per. Sec­ond­ly, it’s the fail­ure of the pri­vate sec­tor to grasp and con­quer the chal­lenge of cre­at­ing a vi­brant and var­ied ex­port sec­tor.

The lat­ter is ab­solute­ly nec­es­sary as a means of break­ing, or at least mit­i­gat­ing, the al­most to­tal de­pen­dence on the en­er­gy sec­tor to earn the for­eign cur­ren­cy need­ed to pur­chase es­sen­tial im­ports. More­over, the recog­ni­tion must come to us in a dra­mat­ic man­ner that out­side a cou­ple of state sec­tor en­er­gy-earn­ing cor­po­ra­tions, it’s the for­eign-owned multi­na­tion­al cor­po­ra­tions which own and con­trol the earn­ing of for­eign ex­change.

The re­al­i­ty of all this is re­flect­ed well in a re­port in the Sun­day Busi­ness Guardian on the Cen­tral Bank’s 2023 An­nu­al Re­port, ap­pro­pri­ate­ly head­lined, “Ap­petite for Im­ports Strong, But In­flows Have De­clined.” It’s a re­cur­rent hap­pen­ing every time the prices on the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket for en­er­gy prod­ucts fall. This fea­ture of our de­pen­dence has con­tin­ued over the last few decades and more, as our ma­ture fields are pro­duc­ing small­er quan­ti­ties of nat­ur­al re­sources.

It is of­ten con­tend­ed by mem­bers of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty that gov­ern­ment in­cen­tives to en­cour­age pro­duc­tive in­vest­ment in ex­ports have been in­suf­fi­cient and not point­ed and com­pelling enough for the lo­cal in­vest­ment com­mu­ni­ty to see pos­si­bil­i­ties for the pro­duc­tion of goods and ser­vices for ex­port.

It is al­so pos­si­ble that the re­gion­al en­vi­ron­ment and mar­kets are not suf­fi­cient­ly pro­pi­tious and like ours, re­main too de­pen­dent on tra­di­tion­al forms of im­port con­sump­tion. There­fore, the de­pen­dence on one sec­tor to earn the for­eign ex­change for all else to live by re­mains chron­ic.

The need is for the coun­try to be in­formed by re­search find­ings of the Cen­tral Bank, mean­ing we should all un­der­stand from the da­ta and the state­ments of the Bank in its var­i­ous re­ports, that stag­na­tion leads in­evitably to de­cline.

While we must utilise the re­sources un­der the sur­face of land and sea and the oc­ca­sion­al boom in en­er­gy prices on the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket, the econ­o­my can­not re­main to­tal­ly de­pen­dent on the rise and fall of in­ter­na­tion­al en­er­gy prices over which we have ab­solute­ly no con­trol.

The so­lu­tions to the prob­lems are not es­sen­tial­ly tech­ni­cal, they are con­cep­tu­al; they are de­pen­dent on the emer­gence of a spir­it of en­tre­pre­neur­ship and the dis­po­si­tion to see pos­si­bil­i­ties out­side of what is on the sur­face.

A breed of en­tre­pre­neurs has to be cul­ti­vat­ed. While there is some­thing of a surge in groups of young peo­ple at­tempt­ing to ex­per­i­ment, it is not suf­fi­cient­ly strong and wide­spread to be­come the dom­i­nant fea­ture of the T&T busi­ness cul­ture.

Our school cur­ric­u­la, our uni­ver­si­ties and tech­ni­cal col­leges must, there­fore, gen­er­ate in­no­v­a­tive minds with the vi­tal­i­ty and en­thu­si­asm to fos­ter that spir­it of en­tre­pre­neur­ship.