The deal then, will be a more complicated and involved matter of funding raw materials for the restart of production in Venezuela and not, as the public might have been inclined to imagine, a mass air drop of care packages of gentle comfort to a nation facing the roughest of times.
?With the news of one aspect of the barter negotiations between T&T and Venezuela making headlines as "oil for toilet paper," it's becoming clear that even that simplification glosses over the challenges that T&T will face in rebuilding an effective trade relationship with the beleaguered South American nation.
That single item, however, underscores the nature of the economic situation that both countries face, with Venezuela sliding much further down the economic slope created by the sharp drop in oil prices than we are today.
Our fragile refining economy may benefit from improved access to oil resources just a few miles away while President
Nicolas Maduro will score a valuable win in improving the supply of a most basic commodity for his citizens.
But even this relatively straightforward deal, one obviously selected for its headline potential and ready public relations upsell, turns out to be a case of tissues with issues.
Faced with critical shortages of basic necessities, Venezuelans, driven by either entrepreneurship or desperation have doubled their normal visits to Cedros, the T&T port closest to their country.
With the ferry service down since August, they now arrive in pirogues in search of these commodities, a situation headlined by a photograph in Friday's Guardian of a large bundle of toilet paper destined to make the perilous crossing back to Venezuela as soft, white contraband, seeking to elude the patrols of the Guardia Nacional.
Meeting those needs officially is not, as one might have assumed, a matter of speeding up the toilet paper production lines locally.
Trinidad Tissues Limited, it turns out, is a subsidiary of Grand Bay International, a Latin American supplier of tissue paper products which already has a large plant in Venezuela.
The deal then, will be a more complicated and involved matter of funding raw materials for the restart of production in Venezuela and not, as the public might have been inclined to imagine, a mass air drop of care packages of gentle comfort to a nation facing the roughest of times.
If such an apparently straightforward agreement is fraught with such complications, T&T would be well advised to approach all its barter agreements with Venezuela with care and clarity.
Barter is one of those trading systems that tends to work either with very large transactions, in which the participants have the support systems to monitor and measure the goods being traded for parity value, or in very small transactions, between individuals, where that value can be a matter of opinion and mutual agreement.
In debt-ridden Greece in 2011, some villages and small towns returned to the traditional trading system as monetary systems collapsed in value.
Opinion and value will play a significant part in our barter arrangements with Venezuela, as local businesses seek to derive the maximum value from the new relationship while the opinions of the people of T&T and Venezuela hang in the balance.
There is no question that improvements in the relationship between our nations will be to our mutual benefit, particularly in the new economic circumstances that are likely to inform the petroleum sector in the future, but in our enthusiasm to cement those ties, we must also be sensible.
There is an old saying that advises, "When your neighbour's house is on fire, first wet your own roof." It is unclear whether, in the wake of the–no doubt revelatory–meetings with Mr Maduro, we have begun that process or even taken the time to evaluate if our fiscal hoses are adequately supplied.