Indera Sagewan-Alli had the following to say in the last Sunday Guardian: "We have yet to understand what this Government's vision is for transforming and indeed diversifying the economic base of the country in the context of the past 2008 global crisis. The Government was not put in place to tell us what the problems are. We know them. We voted them into office to implement solutions and to date we are seeing too little of that." This comment is indeed surprising from one who is an acclaimed economist and someone who was very vocal at one of the Ministry of Planning panchayats. At these six nationwide panchayat sessions, the full strategic management plan (from which end solutions are derived) for the diversification and restructuring of T&T's economy was defined in the context of a national innovation system.
This included the immediate process steps of legitimation (getting public buy-in), foresighting and included the introduction of the immediate reconstructing of our current businesses, for which the ministry's supporting Council for Innovation and Competitiveness, chaired by Dr Bhoe Tewarie, is charged. The next step is the exploitation of our natural and structured resources via knowledge, an undertaking by the Economic Development Board under the chairmanship of Ken Gordon-all of this is in the public domain. Sagewan-Alli, of all people, knows that diversification of an economy is not an overnight affair. Also, the best we can hope for now is to ride out the current and possibly double-dip recession as an externally driven petroleum-based plantation economy, over which we have little control of the boom-bust phenomenon.
Sagewan-Alli should also know that a priori picking of industries in which we hope to become globally competitive without doing some kind of foresighting exercise in this uncertain economic situation is senseless, too much of a gamble. Hence my ministry is now engaged in a foresighting exercise, the first stage of which is now on-line. My colleagues are busy, for example, in trying to increase food production, which again takes time, another is eking out the last of our petroleum resources, another is trying to encourage foreign investment and using all of our embassies as trade facilitators. We met with part of the diaspora in Washington a few weeks ago as a start in engaging their help as investors and skill providers. Sagewan-Alli must know that India, China, S Korea and Brazil are all now reaping the benefits of their national innovation systems, and S Africa is well on their way with theirs. The Vision 2020 authors (six years ago) called for a similar national innovation system but the last regime appeared more concerned with natural gas-based industrialisation rather than on-shore diversification.
Mary K King
Minister of Planning, Economic and
Social Restructuring and Gender Affairs