If Mark Zuckerberg were a Trini...?

Former Minister of Planning and the Economy, Mary King, has for years advocated that the local economy should focus on technology and innovation as its 21 century growth pole. In a recent blog entry, headlined “Tamana, the invisible investment,” she outlined why the Eteck technology park in east Trinidad has been less than successful in attracting investors and investments. “....The lesson here is that a technology park made sense if the basic economic entities and their interconnections exist. Anyone who has been reading my contributions knows that I do not believe that these entities and their interconnections exist in T&T (outside of the highly skewed oil/gas based resources of the energy sector).” She went on to argue that the Eteck chairman and the Ministry of Trade should try to understand that the  government’s role in economic diversification should be to drive innovation. 

 

“Recognise that given our poor technological expertise in a world where technology drives global competitiveness and hence economic development, government’s role is to centrally drive economic development through its centralised thrust into creating these economic entities and their interconnections via the building of an Innovation System,” King wrote on the blog in which she called for  “the establishment of Centres of Excellence that focus on specialised knowledge acquisition, application, its creation (R&D) and the resultant world leading products and services for export.”

My problem with King’s work is that she envisages the Government leading the innovation drive in a way that has not been done in far more innovative countries than ours and against a backdrop of a society, whose culture, education system and business environment focuses more on repetition and rote learning than in out-of-the-box thinking or doing.

It’s like telling an ugly woman that if she puts on the right kind of makeup and loses a few pounds that she can be the next Wendy Fitzwilliam or Janelle “Penny” Commissiong. Instead of attempting to re-invent ourselfs into something that we are not and are never going to be (beautiful), should we not be focusing our diversification efforts in the area in which we already have some competitive advantages?

 

The area, of course, is the Point Lisas Industrial Estate and the methanol, ammonia, urea and iron and steel plants and complexes that are located on the estate. In my view, it is an overwhelming tragedy for the T&T economy that it still exports over 95 per cent of the methanol, ammonia and urea produced here rather than the Government facilitating the development of entire new petrochemical industries from those commodities. The Government decision to initiate negotiations with SABIC and its consortium partners is an indication that it views the development of the downstream petrochemical sector as being key to T&T’s future...although there is already cogent evidence that the Kevin Ramnarine-led Ministry of Energy may have gone for the most costly horse rather than the one with the best proven track record.

It’s very important for any renewed focus on downstream petrochemical industries for there to be some acknowledgment of the impact of the first phase petrochemical development. In other words, we need to ask ourselves this question: What would be the state of T&T at the beginning of 2012 if the visionaries behind the Point Lisas Industrial Estate had decided that it would have been better for the environment of T&T and the residents of the area if the estate was not built?

 

This country still has not acknowledged the debt it owes to Point Lisas and Point Fortin (the liquefaction facilities operated by the company formerly known as Atlantic LNG) for the fact that the previous administration was able to lower the marginal rate of income tax to 25 per cent, remove anybody earning $5,000 or less a month from the tax rolls, make tertiary education “free” and allow the population the chance to increase their take-home pay by the raft of subsidies on pharmecueticals, transport, primary and secondary education and housing. There are those who argue that we should place our diversification bets on agriculture, tourism and information technology. To be successful, those who argue that T&T should be exploring other options to natural gas-led industrialisation, would have to convince the nation that all of the options put together would be able to generate the $15 billion in taxes that the Government collects from energy companies on an annual basis. If the explore-other-options group cannot come up with tax revenues that equal or surpass what the State collects from the energy sector, then maybe what they are in fact arguing is that tertiary education should not be “free,” the inter-island ferry service should not be subsidised, gasoline should not be sold at a fixed price and income taxes should be put back to where they were eight years ago.

 

It seems so obvious to me that the Government is taking money from the oil and gas companies and using it (inter alia) to lower taxes, underwrite tertiary education, build houses and subsidise gasoline and the inter-island ferries. And to be successful, the explore-other-options group would have to argue that the tourism sector in T&T can be competitive with the tourism industry in Barbados or Antigua. In effect, the argument has to be that the beaches of Cedros, washed by the muddy waters of the mighty Orinoco river, can compete with the pink sands and crystal-clear aquamarine waters of the St James coast in Barbados or Grand Anse beach in Grenada. Or that the scenic views and nature trails in Tobago are superior to those in Costa Rica or Dominica. Or, indeed, that the quality of customer service anywhere in Trinidad or Tobago is better than anything on offer anywhere else in the whole world. Can we compete with Barbados when it comes to tourism?

 

Can we compete with the Chinese when it comes to manufacturing? China’s edge is that it has a population of 1.4 billion people and hundreds of millions of workers who are willing to work for a fraction of what an employee in Trinidad works for and do so for longer hours. Even given an eight-hour period, a factory in Shanghai is likely to produce significantly more shirts than a local factory. I mean no disrespect to the local shirt manufacturers when I say that there are very few producers anywhere in the world who can compete against the Chinese in many aspects of manufacturing.

And those who feel that information technology is the way to go would need to look to India. Even given the higher wages, India’s edge is in its ability to produce hundreds of thousands of highly educated, English-speaking engineers and other university-trained personnel who can write software, compute taxes and answer queries for a fraction of what it would cost in the US or in T&T. Can we compete with the Indians when it comes to IT? If Facebook wanted to outsource the writing of software for its next-generation gadget, would it close down its technology centre in Silicon Valley and line up to get into the technology park in Tamana? Indeed, if Mark Zuckerberg were born in Trinidad, would he have created Facebook in the first place?