Nadaleen Singh

Gov­ern­ment plans to lob­by Cari­com for a de­crease in the du­ties on ce­ment, Trade Min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath said yes­ter­day. He spoke about the 9.5 per cent in­crease an­nounced by Trinidad Ce­ment Lim­it­ed (TCL) dur­ing yes­ter­day's post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence.

Bharath said Cab­i­net ap­proved two op­tions for deal­ing with the ce­ment price hike. The first was to ap­proach Cari­com and the sec­ond was to look at the ways in which Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd (TCL) could be more ef­fi­cient.

"I in­tend to go back to the Cari­com through Cot­ed to look at the pos­si­bil­i­ty of some form of re­lief of the 15 per cent du­ties on ce­ment that comes in ex-Cari­com," he said.

"There is prece­dent for this as in 2006, the then Gov­ern­ment went to Cot­ed and had a re­moval of du­ties on ce­ment for a pe­ri­od of time. So there is prece­dent for it.

"The sec­ond op­tion that we are ex­plor­ing, that Cab­i­net has man­dat­ed, is that we sit with TCL and look at the pos­si­bil­i­ty, first of all, based on their true op­er­a­tional costs, look at the pos­si­bil­i­ty of ne­go­ti­at­ing the gas prices that they cur­rent­ly en­joy. With the pro­vi­sion of course that any de­crease in the cost of that in­put will then be passed on sub­se­quent­ly to the con­sumer."

Bharath said the in­crease in ce­ment prices could ham­per projects in­clud­ing the Point Fortin High­way, hous­ing projects, road projects, court hous­es and con­struc­tion projects.