Joshua Sur­tees

"This is a third world coun­try," I hear tri­nis say. When I dis­agree–point­ing to the thou­sands of SU­Vs, huge oil drilling in­dus­try, for­eign in­vest­ment, US-style shop­ping malls, golf cours­es, the speed at which ur­ban roads are paved (putting Britain's lo­cal coun­cils to shame), free ed­u­ca­tion, sub­sidised en­er­gy bills, wa­ter, fu­el, med­i­cine–the re­sponse is usu­al­ly, "Well, they tell us we're still a third world coun­try." They, mean­ing the in­ter­na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty, IMF or the World Bank.

I won­der whether it will com­fort Tri­nis to hear UK Guardian colum­nist Aditya Chakrabort­ty this week de­scribe the UK as a de­vel­op­ing coun­try too? Per­haps a sense of Schaden­freude that the old colo­nial mas­ter is on his knees while mon­ey floods through this once en­slaved colony?

Di­rect com­par­isons be­tween the qual­i­ty of life and cost of liv­ing in re­al terms be­tween the UK and T&T is dif­fi­cult. There are in­dex­es to re­fer to. GDP, av­er­age in­come the pover­ty in­dex etc but sta­tis­tics can be used to prove or dis­prove ideas.

While salaries are low­er here, the cost of liv­ing is much cheap­er (con­sumer prices in­clud­ing rent are 45 per cent low­er than the UK).

The CIA World Fact­book says 17 per cent of the T&T pop­u­la­tion lives be­low the pover­ty line com­pared to 14 per cent of the UK pop­u­la­tion. That's pret­ty close for a sup­posed third world coun­try vs a glob­al su­per­pow­er.

What does a "de­vel­op­ing coun­try" mean in re­al­i­ty? The term third world is out­dat­ed, coined dur­ing the Cold War when Amer­i­ca and Eu­rope were clas­si­fied as First World, the com­mu­nist So­vi­et Bloc as Sec­ond World and Africa, Asia, South Amer­i­ca as Third World. Pro­pa­gan­da used to sug­gest cap­i­tal­ism was the pre­ferred so­cio-eco­nom­ic sys­tem.

I've been to de­vel­op­ing coun­tries in West Africa and the Mid­dle East. The in­fra­struc­ture, em­ploy­ment rates and mod­ernised facets of T&T life are in­com­pa­ra­ble to those in Ghana or Syr­ia. You don't walk in­to pub­lic bath­rooms in those coun­tries and find mo­tion-sen­sor sink taps, au­to flush­ing toi­lets and sani­tised bath­rooms. In Syr­ia, you feel thank­ful the toi­let is a w/c not a hole in the ground. Mil­lions of peo­ple live in tiny shacks with tin roofs, so­cial hous­ing is non ex­is­tent. Beg­gars on the streets nu­mer­ous, many in need of med­ical help.

Here, even those liv­ing in HDC work­ing ap­par­ent­ly low paid jobs in re­tail or, ahem, jour­nal­ism, fly back and forth from New York or Mi­a­mi like tak­ing the bus.

Some say Tri­nis can't af­ford these lux­u­ries (cars, air trav­el etc) and that they live in debt. The UK is one of the world's debt cap­i­tals. We live in our over­drafts and by month end we're lucky if our bank ac­counts are on­ly -�1,000. We stack up debt on cred­it cards and pay it back in tiny amounts.

Rent­ing a room in Lon­don costs �600-700 ($6,000-7,000) a month. My tiny stu­dio flat com­mands rent of �1,040 a month ($10,400). Quite ob­scene. Here I share a beau­ti­ful apart­ment in Cas­cade for a quar­ter of that price.

Fill­ing a car with petrol in Eng­land costs �60-80 ($600-800). Here it costs $120. UK gas and elec­tric­i­ty bills av­er­age �110 ($1,100) a month. Here in T&T that would keep you go­ing for three months.

Ed­u­ca­tion is free here and T&T has one of the high­est lit­er­a­cy rates in the world, send­ing dozens of schol­ar­ship win­ners to over­seas uni­ver­si­ties every year. The Pub­lic Health Ser­vice is not with­out its prob­lems but British hos­pi­tals and stan­dards of care are just as much of a lot­tery; over­stretched and un­der re­sourced the NHS is on the point of col­lapse. Pa­tients go in­to hos­pi­tal for rou­tine op­er­a­tions and die from con­tract­ing hos­pi­tal-borne dis­eases like MR­SA be­cause hos­pi­tals are un­clean. There are count­less NHS hor­ror sto­ries.

Leav­ing aside the ex­tremes of pover­ty and wealth, eg Beetham Gar­dens (which may be mar­gin­al­ly ma­te­ri­al­ly worse off than a Glas­gow ten­e­ment hous­ing project) and La­dy Chan­cel­lor Rd (which might be slight­ly less rich than Kens­ing­ton & Chelsea) the av­er­age work­ing class or mid­dle class trini­is, in my opin­ion, at least on a par with the equiv­a­lent in Britain, if not bet­ter off.

Trinidad is of­ten de­scribed as a ba­nana re­pub­lic, re­ly­ing sole­ly on one prod­uct's ex­por­ta­tion for eco­nom­ic sta­bil­i­ty and with prof­its go­ing to those in pow­er. Chakrabort­ty says of Britain, "Even ba­nana re­publics have cash: it just ends up in the hands of a very few peo­ple," then ex­plains how the UK is no dif­fer­ent.

One is of course aware that the mon­ey in T&T (thanks to the black gold ooz­ing from the ground) is fi­nite and one hopes the gov­ern­ment is putting lots away for the bust times not frit­ter­ing it away dur­ing boom. If Eng­land and T&T are on a par then what's left to de­cide is whether both are "de­vel­oped" or "de­vel­op­ing", first world or third. Let's cut our loss­es and say we're both sec­ond world. Fair's fair.

?