There are kinder­gartens clos­ing in Uruguay and Chile. Busi­ness­es in Trinidad and To­ba­go are pay­ing more for pri­vate se­cu­ri­ty. A pirogue is cross­ing the Gulf of Paria from Venezuela with ques­tion­able car­go. A pen­sion­er in Trinidad is anx­ious about his NIS ben­e­fits.

At first glance, noth­ing about those sit­u­a­tions seem to be con­nect­ed. In re­al­i­ty, every­thing is con­nect­ed. The chal­lenge is that we view each of the pol­i­cy de­ci­sions that sur­round the sit­u­a­tions out­lined above in si­los and in iso­la­tion. We need to el­e­vate the dis­cus­sion in­to some­thing much more holis­tic.

In Feb­ru­ary 2013, fol­low­ing the re­lease of our last na­tion­al cen­sus, I wrote about T&T’s de­mo­graph­ic time bomb. At the time the da­ta showed that 70.4 per­cent of our pop­u­la­tion was of work­ing age. That sound­ed com­fort­ing un­til you looked deep­er. Forty per cent of the pop­u­la­tion was al­ready over the age of 40, 10 per­cent was over 65, and our age­ing in­dex placed us firm­ly in the cat­e­go­ry of an old pop­u­la­tion. I asked then where we would get the hu­man re­sources to di­ver­si­fy our econ­o­my if both our nat­ur­al cap­i­tal and our hu­man cap­i­tal were be­ing de­plet­ed at the same time.

That ques­tion still re­mains unan­swered. How do we even think about di­ver­si­fy­ing the econ­o­my with­out the hu­man cap­i­tal in both size and qual­i­ty need­ed for the type of econ­o­my we wish to di­ver­si­fy in­to?

Thir­teen years lat­er we are still wait­ing on an up­dat­ed cen­sus. The Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice has on­ly now be­gun prepa­ra­tion for the next Pop­u­la­tion and Hous­ing Cen­sus. That is an un­der­stand­able de­lay giv­en the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic of 2020. If this time­line takes us to around 2030, the re­al­i­ty in plain lan­guage is we are still mak­ing de­ci­sions about schools, pen­sions, crime, mi­gra­tion, health care, hous­ing and labour mar­kets us­ing a de­mo­graph­ic map that is bad­ly out of date.

Fur­ther, these is­sues are not lo­cal. A re­cent re­port in Amer­i­c­as Quar­ter­ly, point­ed to the sud­den fer­til­i­ty fall off across Latin Amer­i­ca. ECLAC now re­ports that Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean’s to­tal fer­til­i­ty rate reached 1.8 chil­dren per woman in 2024, be­low the 2.1 re­place­ment rate, and that 76 per­cent of the re­gion’s coun­tries and ter­ri­to­ries are be­low re­place­ment. Chile, Cos­ta Ri­ca, Uruguay and Ar­genti­na are among the low­est fer­til­i­ty coun­tries in Latin Amer­i­ca.

Grey

This is the so called grey tide. The re­gion is not just hav­ing few­er chil­dren; it is get­ting old­er. The share of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean’s pop­u­la­tion aged 65 and over is pro­ject­ed to rise sharply by 2050. The wider cat­e­go­ry of per­sons 60 and over will ac­count for rough­ly a quar­ter of the re­gion by then. There are busi­ness op­por­tu­ni­ties in this: care homes, health ser­vices, ac­ces­si­ble tourism, ro­bot­ics, fi­nan­cial plan­ning and age-re­lat­ed tech­nol­o­gy. How­ev­er, op­por­tu­ni­ties do not ar­rive neat­ly pack­aged. They come with pen­sion costs, health costs, fund­ing el­der-care costs and po­lit­i­cal pres­sure.

T&T is not out­side this sto­ry. PA­HO’s 2024 coun­try pro­file es­ti­mates our pop­u­la­tion at just over 1.5 mil­lion and says per­sons over 65 al­ready ac­count for 12.4 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion. In 2013 we were warned by our own cen­sus that we were age­ing. To­day we are liv­ing the warn­ing.

In Ju­ly 2022 I asked, “What have we done?” The ques­tion then was di­rect­ed at the dam­age done to chil­dren through pro­longed school clo­sures and nar­row pub­lic health think­ing. The World Bank, UN­ESCO and UNICEF es­ti­mat­ed in 2022 that 70 per cent of ten year olds in low and mid­dle in­come coun­tries could not un­der­stand a sim­ple writ­ten text. In Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean, the pro­ject­ed fig­ure was 80 per cent, up from around 50 per cent be­fore the pan­dem­ic. The life­time earn­ings loss was es­ti­mat­ed at US$21 tril­lion.

Those num­bers were not ab­stract. They were a warn­ing about pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, crime, fu­ture earn­ings and na­tion­al sta­bil­i­ty. A small­er fu­ture work­force is a chal­lenge. A small­er fu­ture work­force car­ry­ing a learn­ing deficit, fac­ing high crime and look­ing for op­por­tu­ni­ties abroad is a na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment cri­sis.

This is where the bor­der be­comes part of the de­mo­graph­ic sto­ry. T&T is close to Venezuela. The wa­ter be­tween us is a cor­ri­dor of le­gal trade, fam­i­ly ties, fish­ing, mi­gra­tion, smug­gling, nar­cotics, firearms and hu­man traf­fick­ing. The UN­ODC’s 2024 Caribbean gangs re­port iden­ti­fies T&T as a ma­jor tran­sit point for co­caine and cannabis and points to Venezuela as the pri­ma­ry sup­ply route for drugs in­to the coun­try, with move­ment by com­mer­cial freight, pri­vate go-fast boats and fish­ing ves­sels. It al­so notes the in­volve­ment of Venezue­lan crim­i­nal groups in col­lab­o­ra­tion and com­pe­ti­tion with lo­cal gangs.

Holis­tic

So when we speak about crime in T&T, we should stop pre­tend­ing that this is on­ly a do­mes­tic polic­ing prob­lem. It is not. It is a mar­itime se­cu­ri­ty prob­lem, a cus­toms prob­lem, an im­mi­gra­tion prob­lem and a cor­rup­tion prob­lem.

For T&T, we can­not treat bor­der se­cu­ri­ty as a line on a map. We have is­sues with radar cov­er­age, ves­sel readi­ness, port scan­ning, cus­toms in­tegri­ty, im­mi­gra­tion da­ta, fi­nan­cial in­tel­li­gence and the abil­i­ty to know who and what is mov­ing through our wa­ters. So much so that we in­tu­itive­ly know we should be seek­ing help from those who are more ca­pa­ble in this area. We have not been able to do this on our own with decades of try­ing. In­volv­ing the Unit­ed States in sup­port­ing these is­sues seems ob­vi­ous, ex­cept that it has cu­ri­ous­ly caused angst among some.

The cost of fail­ure is not on­ly count­ed in mur­ders. It is count­ed in busi­ness con­fi­dence. T&T record­ed 623 mur­ders in 2024, a his­toric num­ber, and the State re­spond­ed with three con­sec­u­tive states of emer­gency. The pub­lic nat­u­ral­ly fo­cuss­es on the body count. Busi­ness own­ers fo­cus al­so on the op­er­at­ing cost: guards, cam­eras, in­sur­ance, short­ened hours, lost in­ven­to­ry, de­liv­ery risks, staff anx­i­ety, ex­tor­tion and rep­u­ta­tion­al dam­age.

A 2024 busi­ness sur­vey re­port­ed that 57 per­cent of re­spon­dents were spend­ing more on se­cu­ri­ty and in­sur­ance be­cause of crime. Nine per cent said they or their com­pa­ny had been threat­ened or co­erced to pay pro­tec­tion mon­ey, and 18 per cent re­port­ed be­ing asked to pay bribes. In a 2025 out­look sur­vey, (be­fore the last elec­tion), 79 per cent of re­spon­dents were not con­fi­dent that the lo­cal econ­o­my would grow in 2025 and 92 per cent said crime pre­ven­tion and re­duc­tion should be the Gov­ern­ment’s top pri­or­i­ty to pos­i­tive­ly im­pact busi­ness.

Every dol­lar spent on pro­tec­tion from dis­or­der is a dol­lar not spent on wages, train­ing, tech­nol­o­gy, ex­pan­sion or ex­ports. Crime is not on­ly vi­o­lence. It is a pri­vate sec­tor tax col­lect­ed as a re­sult of dis­or­der. T&T ranked 105th out of 190 economies in the World Bank’s Do­ing Busi­ness 2020 pro­file, be­fore that in­dex was dis­con­tin­ued. Add crime, for­eign ex­change short­ages, slow ap­provals, port de­lays, cor­rup­tion risk and un­cer­tain­ty, and you do not have an in­vest­ment cli­mate. Do­ing busi­ness in Trinidad and To­ba­go is more of an en­durance test.

Now place all of this next to the pen­sion prob­lem which I have pre­vi­ous­ly out­lined at length. If the pop­u­la­tion ages, if the birth rate falls, if young peo­ple mi­grate, if too many work­ers re­main in­for­mal, if crime weak­ens busi­ness ac­tiv­i­ty and if ed­u­ca­tion loss­es re­duce pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, then the pen­sion prob­lem be­comes much more than an ac­tu­ar­i­al is­sue. It be­comes a na­tion­al sol­ven­cy is­sue.

In 2013 I asked whether we had an im­mi­gra­tion pol­i­cy. I ask again. Is im­mi­gra­tion mere­ly a na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty is­sue or is it part of eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment? Can we dis­tin­guish be­tween hu­man­i­tar­i­an oblig­a­tion, labour mar­ket need, de­mo­graph­ic re­new­al and se­cu­ri­ty risk, or will we treat mi­gra­tion as a po­lit­i­cal slo­gan un­til it ap­pears as a school place, hos­pi­tal, gang or labour mar­ket is­sue?

I didn’t sit de­cid­ing to write a crime col­umn, a pen­sion col­umn, an ed­u­ca­tion col­umn, an im­mi­gra­tion col­umn or a cen­sus col­umn. It is one col­umn about na­tion­al ca­pac­i­ty. T&T is be­ing asked to car­ry more weight with weak­er in­sti­tu­tions, old­er cit­i­zens, few­er pre­pared young peo­ple, more ex­pen­sive se­cu­ri­ty and a busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty los­ing con­fi­dence.

The pur­pose of this col­umn is to help to con­nect the dots in the hope that the con­ver­sa­tion will be­come more holis­tic and less siloed.

We have to treat mar­itime se­cu­ri­ty as eco­nom­ic pol­i­cy. Build a re­al im­mi­gra­tion pol­i­cy. Re­form pen­sions even fur­ther be­fore time makes re­form harsh­er. Re­duce crime not on­ly to save lives, but to re­store busi­ness con­fi­dence.

These are not sep­a­rate bud­getary items. As a coun­try we ei­ther em­brace the nec­es­sary holis­tic dis­cus­sion now, or we pay lat­er.

Ian Nar­ine is a fi­nan­cial con­sul­tant who rec­og­nizes that sec­ond or­der think­ing is more im­por­tant than first or­der think­ing. Please send your com­ments to ian@ian­nar­ine.com