T&T must trade to sur­vive, Vas­ant Bharath, Min­is­ter of Trade, In­dus­try and In­vest­ment told mem­bers of the Greater Tu­na­puna Cham­ber when he ad­dressed their Busi­ness Fo­rum at the T&T Bu­reau of Stan­dards Au­di­to­ri­um on Wednes­day.

Ad­dress­ing the theme of the Fo­rum, Con­fronting Chal­lenges with Trade, the min­is­ter said "while coun­tries across the globe are still strug­gling to re­cov­er from the eco­nom­ic cri­sis faced in 2008, we in Trinidad and To­ba­go must cre­ate that en­abling en­vi­ron­ment for in­vest­ment op­por­tu­ni­ties".

Bharath ac­knowl­edged that there were im­ped­i­ments to do­ing busi­ness lo­cal­ly which the gov­ern­ment is work­ing as­sid­u­ous­ly to re­duce or im­prove. He said the Trade Min­istry and the World Bank Or­gan­i­sa­tion are work­ing close­ly to im­prove in­di­ca­tors which af­fect T&T's rank­ing in the Ease of Do­ing Busi­ness In­dex where the coun­try cur­rent­ly ranks 69th. He said it is the goal of the min­istry to have T&T move 20 spots up and rank 49th in the next 12 months.

Bharath said Trade Min­istry in col­lab­o­ra­tion with oth­er rel­e­vant min­istries have been mak­ing head­way in reengi­neer­ing many of the process­es in­volved in do­ing busi­ness. Some of the im­proved ser­vice de­liv­ery times in­clude:

�2 e-Com­pa­ny Reg­is­tra­tion, pro­cess­ing time re­duced from sev­en days to three days

�2 e-Work Per­mit, pro­cess­ing time re­duced from six weeks to two and a half weeks

�2 e-Im­port/ Ex­port Per­mits and Li­cens­es, pro­cess­ing time re­duced from four weeks to one day

�2 e-Cer­tifi­cate of Ori­gin, pro­cess­ing time re­duced from on day to thir­ty min­utes

�2 start­ing a busi­ness, pro­cess­ing time re­duced from forty three days to three days.

Al­so speak­ing at the Busi­ness Fo­rum was Taran Singh, Pres­i­dent of the Greater Tu­na­puna Cham­ber, who con­grat­u­lat­ed Bharath on re­cent di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion ini­tia­tives im­ple­ment­ed by his min­istry to im­prove and grow the non-en­er­gy sec­tors with the aim of achiev­ing in­creased busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties and eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty.