Raphael John-Lall

Gov­ern­ment in­tends to build sev­en in­dus­tri­al parks with part of the $3 bil­lion Chi­na has made avail­able to Cari­com, Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar an­nounced yes­ter­day."Pres­i­dent Xi's of­fer of TT$3 bil­lion is of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance for our na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment and I want to an­nounce to­day that T&T would be able to im­me­di­ate­ly ac­cess these funds to ac­cel­er­ate the de­vel­op­ment of busi­ness/com­mer­cial and in­dus­tri­al parks through­out T&T," she said at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the Caribbean In­vest­ment Fo­rum (CIF) at theTrinidad Hilton and Con­fer­ence Cen­tre, St Ann's.

Per­sad-Bisses­sar said the in­dus­tri­al park, to be built on 592.1 acres of land, rep­re­sents an in­vest­ment of TT$833 mil­lion and the leasable space on the es­tates will be 355.7 acres. "This would give an im­me­di­ate boost to our coun­try's eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty. We can do this with­in the next two years in­stead of wait­ing for this ex­pan­sion," she said.The prime min­is­ter al­so said T&T has signed a Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MOU) with the Unit­ed States De­part­ment of En­er­gy to es­tab­lish a Re­new­able En­er­gy Re­search Cen­tre to pro­mote rapid de­ploy­ment of crit­i­cal tech­nolo­gies for re­new­able en­er­gies for T&T. Apart from the US and Chi­na, she said, the Cana­di­ans are big in­vestors in T&T."Cana­di­an in­vest­ment in T&T is now mea­sured in bil­lions of Cana­di­an dol­lars. It is grow­ing an­nu­al­ly be­cause Cana­di­an busi­ness lead­ers recog­nise T&T as a vi­able busi­ness des­ti­na­tion. It is a reaf­fir­ma­tion that T&T is in­deed the place to be," she said.

Ben Co­hen, co founder of Ben and Jer­ry's Ice Cream, who gave the fea­ture ad­dress at the CIF open­ing, said their rad­i­cal busi­ness mod­el based on busi­ness­es grow­ing in their com­mu­ni­ties, is as old as the Bible."As you give you re­ceive, as you help oth­ers you are helped in re­turn. As your busi­ness sup­ports the com­mu­ni­ty, the com­mu­ni­ty sup­ports your busi­ness. It works for in­di­vid­u­als and it al­so works for busi­ness­es," he said.Ben & Jer­ry's, a di­vi­sion of the An­glo-Dutch Unilever con­glom­er­ate, man­u­fac­tures ice cream, frozen yo­gurt and oth­er re­lat­ed prod­ucts. It was found­ed in 1978 in Ver­mont in the Unit­ed States.