Dix­ie-Ann Dick­son

Cather­ine Ku­mar, chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce is urg­ing to the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to join forces with the Gov­ern­ment in re-build­ing the coun­try's im­age. This call came in light of a num­ber of neg­a­tive in­ter­na­tion­al re­ports and ad­vi­sories, which Ku­mar said may have had a sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on the coun­try's im­age. The lat­est is the Trans­paren­cy In­ter­na­tion­al 2011 Cor­rup­tion Per­cep­tions in­dex (CPI) that was re­leased last week. The in­dex ranked T&T in po­si­tion 91 out of 183 coun­tries, with a score of 3.2 out of 10, the low­est in years. T&T ranked 73 out of 178, with a score of 3.6 in 2010.

The Cor­rup­tion Per­cep­tions in­dex is a sur­vey of sur­veys un­der­tak­en by in­ter­na­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions which rank var­i­ous coun­tries based on the per­cep­tions held by se­nior res­i­dent, busi­ness lead­ers and non-res­i­dent an­a­lysts. It is no doubt, Ku­mar said, that the in­dex added to the list of neg­a­tive re­ports do not au­gur well for fu­ture in­vest­ments in T&T. As such, she said the coun­try has a lot of work to do in re-build­ing its im­age glob­al­ly. Af­ter the Gov­ern­ment had em­barked on a num­ber of ini­tia­tives to mar­ket T&T in­ter­na­tion­al­ly and with 2012 just around the cor­ner, Ku­mar ad­vised that "we should mar­ket and pro­mote our strengths as the main thrust in re-build­ing T&T's im­age."

Some of the coun­try's strengths in­clude an ed­u­cat­ed labour force, an en­er­gy sec­tor with a skilled labour and op­por­tu­ni­ties for down stream busi­ness, a grow­ing agri­cul­ture sec­tor and an at­trac­tive ge­o­graph­ic lo­ca­tion. "We have oth­er prod­ucts and things that are very at­trac­tive for po­ten­tial in­vest­ments." There­fore, Ku­mar said, the coun­try should fo­cus on those pos­i­tive things and not the neg­a­tive as­pects of the coun­try. The State of Emer­gency, which ends to­day, was felt by some to be one of the ma­jor fac­tors that cre­at­ed a neg­a­tive per­cep­tion on the coun­try. But Ku­mar said the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty felt it was a proac­tive mea­sure tak­en by the Gov­ern­ment in try­ing to deal with crime, which was at a des­per­ate sit­u­a­tion.

She stat­ed it was not all in vain, as some good came out of it. "But we all need to re­build the coun­try's im­age be­cause if we do not get our arms around the crime sit­u­a­tion, it would hin­der us from tak­ing the coun­try for­ward, not just from for­eign di­rect in­vest­ment, but from lo­cal in­vest­ments as well." Stat­ing that crime is a heavy se­cu­ri­ty cost to the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty, she said "the gov­ern­ment needs to put more be­hind crime." How­ev­er, Ku­mar said that she was still op­ti­mistic about 2012 in which the coun­try would "not blind­ly close our eyes to the things we need to im­prove on like the ease of do­ing busi­ness, but to be a lit­tle more dili­gent in our plans and get­ting them go­ing."