The state en­ter­prise EtecK, charged with the non-en­er­gy di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion of the econ­o­my, has spent some $1 bil­lion on its flag­ship project, the Tamana Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Park. This fund­ing is made up of gov­ern­ment spend­ing and loans. There is very lit­tle to show for this spend­ing (while loans have to be ser­viced). Ac­cord­ing to the cur­rent chair­man, Bri­an Fron­tin, "If you want to see the $1 bil­lion you can't see, walk in­to EtecK Tamana!" The chair­man rec­om­mends that this Gov­ern­ment should not in­vest any­more in­to the Tamana project but look at mar­ket­ing the area.

The chair­man says that two com­pa­nies are in­ter­est­ed in lo­cat­ing in Tamana, one of which is a da­ta cen­tre. It is use­ful to note that these da­ta cen­tres are huge con­sumers of elec­tric­i­ty and con­ces­sion­ary pric­ing of gas-de­rived elec­tric­i­ty may be the car­rot. Fur­ther, he sees that our trade agree­ments, es­pe­cial­ly with Latin Amer­i­ca, which can make us a gate­way in­to the re­gion, can at­tract the In­di­an com­pa­nies-the fo­cus of the last vis­it to In­dia. Al­so, EtecK plans on en­gag­ing con­sul­tants from the US and In­dia to help us chart a course of ac­tion for Tamana.

The Tamana Park project spans both a UNC and a PNM regime. Both sets of plan­ners based their ideas for Tamana (ini­tial­ly Waller­field Park) on the premise that if cer­tain ameni­ties ex­ist­ed, for­eign in­vest­ment would flock to Tamana. The park was sup­posed to of­fer good telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions (now stan­dard any­where of note), near­ness to South Amer­i­ca and our trade agree­ments (but the ma­jor coun­tries/in­vestors are do­ing busi­ness di­rect­ly with South Amer­i­ca), skilled hu­man re­source (with no record of in­dus­tri­al in­ven­tive­ness or in­no­va­tion) and what­ev­er.

The con­sul­tants the UNC gov­ern­ment em­ployed had a track record in con­struct­ing a park some­where in the world-they were ex­perts in con­struc­tion. They were con­cerned with en­tic­ing IBM, GE and the like to lo­cate at Waller­field. With the change in gov­ern­ment to the PNM, con­struc­tion still re­mained the pre­mier goal with the ad­di­tion of a UTT flag­ship cam­pus that was sup­posed to add a knowl­edge flavour to the park. The ap­proach to de­vel­op­ment of the sub­scribers to this tech­nol­o­gy park re­mind us of such suc­cess­es in Sin­ga­pore, Shan­non in Ire­land and the many such parks in the US, par­tic­u­lar­ly Sil­i­con Val­ley. What they fail to dis­cuss or con­sid­er is that these parks de­vel­oped be­cause oth­er ma­jor draw­ing cards ex­ist­ed and not vice ver­sa.

For ex­am­ple, Shan­non and its neigh­bours were tru­ly gate­ways for the US in­to the EU giv­en the large mar­ket that was de­vel­op­ing in Eu­rope; Sin­ga­pore was a ma­jor trans­ship­ment port for Asia and of course Sil­i­con Val­ley was the hub that con­nect­ed the stel­lar Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, the large com­pa­ny Hewlett Packard and the high­ly skilled dig­i­tal en­gi­neers of the area. The les­son here is that a tech­nol­o­gy park makes sense if the ba­sic eco­nom­ic en­ti­ties and their in­ter­con­nec­tions ex­ist. Hence at­tract­ing for­eign in­vest­ment in­to Tamana would have been at the pro­duc­tion lev­el (as is our cur­rent man­u­fac­tur­ing) and this would de­pend on the kind of tax and re­source con­ces­sions we were will­ing to give-sub­sidised elec­tric­i­ty and nat­ur­al gas prices, for ex­am­ple. This is not sus­tain­able de­vel­op­ment.

EtecK's chair­man and the Min­istry of Trade should try to un­der­stand what is gov­ern­ment's role in eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion; to­day the ac­cent is on in­no­va­tion. Recog­nise that giv­en our poor tech­no­log­i­cal ex­per­tise in a world where tech­nol­o­gy dri­ves glob­al com­pet­i­tive­ness and hence eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment, gov­ern­ment's role is to cen­tral­ly dri­ve eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­ment through its cen­tralised thrust in­to cre­at­ing these eco­nom­ic en­ti­ties and their in­ter­con­nec­tions via the build­ing of an in­no­va­tion sys­tem. Build­ing new in­fra­struc­ture (eg a high-speed Big Broad­band net­work) and in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket­ing may be part of the in­no­va­tion sys­tem but this in­cludes, for ex­am­ple, the es­tab­lish­ment of cen­tres of ex­cel­lence that fo­cus on spe­cialised knowl­edge ac­qui­si­tion, ap­pli­ca­tion, its cre­ation (R&D) and the re­sul­tant world lead­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices for ex­port.

Mary King

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