Dr Win­ford James

Con­se­quent up­on re­ceiv­ing the green­light from Amer­i­ca, via an OFAC li­cence, to re­sume the Drag­on Gas trade with Venezuela, af­ter un­cer­e­mo­ni­ous­ly re­ject­ing it up­on tak­ing of­fice, Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar in­formed us that she was go­ing to go to Venezuela to re­new the arrange­ments with the Venezue­lan au­thor­i­ties.

But be­fore she could get there, Del­cy Ro­dríguez, Vice Pres­i­dent of Venezuela, has an­nounced at their re­cent EX­PO­FORO EM­PRE­SAR­I­AL VENEZUELA PRO­DUC­TI­VA 2030 a num­ber of ideas re­lat­ed to the Drag­on Gas arrange­ments,in­clud­ing the fol­low­ing:

• ↓Kam­la is Mar­co Ru­bio’s (pup­pet) Prime Min­is­ter in Trinidad and To­ba­go and she is fool­ing her peo­ple and even lead­ing them to a precipice.

• ↓(Giv­en the sanc­tions which they have im­posed on Venezuela and which are still in place), they are say­ing that Amer­i­ca will be tak­ing Venezuela’s gas and gift­ing it to Trinidad and To­ba­go.

• ↓Venezuela’s gas comes with a price tag, and, like oth­er neigh­bour­ing coun­tries, T&T must pay for every mol­e­cule that Venezuela ex­ports to them (via the 18-kilo­me­tre pipeline).

• ↓Venezuela is deal­ing with T&T, not with Ru­bio or Amer­i­ca.

• ↓It would be be­yond ir­re­spon­si­ble for Venezuela to give away its gas. It is not what Com­man­der Hugo Chavez would have want­ed.

• ↓T&T needs Venezuela gas and the on­ly way is through the Venezue­lan Gov­ern­ment. The on­ly oth­er way is fan­ta­sy. If Venezuela were to stop ex­port­ing gas to T&T, the lat­ter’s econ­o­my would col­lapse, neg­a­tive­ly im­pact­ing the Caribbean.

• ↓Ru­bio is poi­son­ing Kam­la with ‘pa­jar­i­tos preña­dos’, or, as one trans­la­tor put it, pipe dreams.

Ro­dríguez felt that pa­jar­i­tos preña­dos was the most suit­able phrase to cap­ture what Ru­bio was sell­ing Kam­la, and Kam­la’s naïveté. It lit­er­al­ly means preg­nant lit­tle birds, but it de­rives its col­lo­qui­al us­age (of naïveté, im­prac­ti­cal­i­ty, im­pos­si­bil­i­ty, etc) from the in­abil­i­ty of (fe­male) birds to be get preg­nant since they are re­strict­ed to lay­ing eggs.

So when she does get around to go­ing to Venezuela, will Kam­la feel du­ty bound to re­spond to Ro­dríguez? Will she in­sist that Amer­i­ca/Ru­bio must be part of the arrange­ments al­ready made with Venezuela by the Kei­th Row­ley ad­min­is­tra­tion? Or will she for a sec­ond time re­ject the ear­li­er agree­ments? What will the fo­cal points be?

Ro­dríguez has spo­ken be­fore Kam­la has gone to Venezuela, which may be a good thing for Kam­la since she can pur­chase the op­por­tu­ni­ty to re­view and re­vise what she orig­i­nal­ly planned to say af­ter con­sul­ta­tion with knowl­edge­able lo­cal and re­gion­al stake­hold­ers.

To make sure the read­er is fol­low­ing the nar­ra­tive prop­er­ly, let me re­view the essence of the deal struck by both coun­tries. As I un­der­stand it, they are en­gaged in mak­ing arrange­ments with re­spect to mon­eti­sa­tion of the Drag­on gas field which is whol­ly lo­cat­ed in Venezuela and owned by Venezuela and its state-owned com­pa­ny PDVSA. But Venezuela does not have the pro­cess­ing and liq­ue­fy­ing fa­cil­i­ties for ex­port­ing the gas to the world. T&T does. So we can say that the (raw ma­te­r­i­al) re­source is lo­cat­ed in one coun­try and its des­ti­na­tion is in an­oth­er.

In brief, Venezuela sells its re­source to T&T and the lat­ter process­es, mar­kets, and ex­ports the fi­nal prod­uct. The eco­nom­ic ben­e­fits will be shared by the two coun­tries—by three if we count Amer­i­ca in.

The Drag­on gas field comes in phas­es. The cur­rent phase is ne­go­ti­a­tions un­der an Amer­i­can li­cence pri­mar­i­ly for work­ing out the com­mer­cial terms of the project, and it will ex­pire next April. Giv­en its sanc­tions on Venezuela, Amer­i­ca man­dates the in­clu­sion of Amer­i­can com­pa­nies in the ne­go­ti­a­tions phase of the project (much to the dis­plea­sure of Vice Pres­i­dent Ro­dríguez).

The Drag­on gas field is es­ti­mat­ed to hold 4 to 4.2 tril­lion cu­bic feet of nat­ur­al gas.

The project in­volves de­vel­op­ing the field and con­struct­ing an un­der­sea pipeline some 14-22 km long to trans­port/ex­port the gas to T&T’s pro­cess­ing fa­cil­i­ties. Ro­dríguez re­minds us that the gas is a life­line for T&T’s econ­o­my, which has been ex­pe­ri­enc­ing de­clines in gas pro­duc­tion for over a decade now. Ac­cess to Venezuela’s gas would help re­store ca­pac­i­ty and keep T&T as a key en­er­gy sup­pli­er in the Caribbean.

I sup­pose Ro­dríguez could put her mouth in the mat­ter be­cause she is the ven­dor, but Kam­la can’t be­cause she is a buy­er. But what about pri­vate sec­tor spokesper­sons?

Win­ford James is a re­tired UWI lec­tur­er who has been analysing is­sues in ed­u­ca­tion, lan­guage, de­vel­op­ment, and pol­i­tics in Trinidad and To­ba­go and the wider Caribbean on ra­dio and TV since the 1970s. He has al­so writ­ten thou­sands of columns for all the ma­jor news­pa­pers in the coun­try. He can be reached at jay­win­ster@gmail.com