Peo­ple in To­ba­go must be aware the state of emer­gency in To­ba­go is hav­ing some ef­fects and the longer it con­tin­ues the more like­ly it would af­fect the is­land's tourism in­dus­try, said To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) Chief Sec­re­tary Orville Lon­don on Tues­day. Lon­don said he was hop­ing that when the de­ci­sion-mak­ers de­cide when to end the state of emer­gency they take this in­to con­sid­er­a­tion. "I think we in the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly have made it very clear that we are not go­ing to ar­gue about the need for ac­tion against the crim­i­nal el­e­ment, but we have got to bal­ance that against the oth­er im­pact and al­so place our­selves in the po­si­tion where we are pre­pared to jus­ti­fy the ex­tent of the mea­sures which we are putting in place in an ef­fort to curb the crim­i­nal el­e­ment," he told re­porters at the THA's week­ly post-Ex­ec­u­tive Coun­cil me­dia brief­ing.

"We are op­er­at­ing in a high­ly- com­pet­i­tive en­vi­ron­ment where per­sons will baulk at the slight­est neg­a­tive vibes they get from a par­tic­u­lar des­ti­na­tion be­cause they have so many choic­es and peo­ple at­tempt to por­tray their des­ti­na­tion in so many at­trac­tive ways." He not­ed that To­ba­go still had its clien­tele but some peo­ple were a lit­tle con­cerned, so the longer the state of emer­gency goes on, the more like­ly more and more peo­ple will be­gin to tell them­selves that com­ing to To­ba­go is not worth the per­ceived risks. "We are re­al­ly deal­ing with per­cep­tion...You are there a cou­ple thou­sand miles away and what you hear about a state of emer­gency in T&T and in those cir­cum­stances you re­late that to a par­tic­u­lar en­vi­ron­ment and one that is not par­tic­u­lar­ly en­cour­ag­ing and that is the chal­lenge that we have," he said.