Cherisse Moe

Econ­o­mist Dr In­dera Sage­wan-Al­li is con­cerned that the gas price of US$2.75 used for the 2010 bud­get is too high, and gov­ern­ment may run a much high­er deficit than the $8 bil­lion pro­ject­ed. Sage­wan-Al­li said the cur­rent price is low­er than the gov­ern­ment's pro­jec­tion of US$2.50 on the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket. She said grow­ing sup­plies, stor­age fa­cil­i­ties reach­ing full ca­pac­i­ty and de­mand re­main­ing flat are all point­ing to­ward prices get­ting even low­er over time.

She said ad­di­tion­al sup­plies and new pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ties were ex­pect­ed to come on stream from the 4th quar­ter of this year, flood­ing the mar­ket and putting pres­sure on the price to fall. In ad­di­tion, the lat­est strength in oil prices will not be enough to shore up the rev­enue short­fall she an­tic­i­pates will come from gas.

She dis­missed the 2009/2010 fis­cal pack­age as noth­ing more than a "po­lit­i­cal bud­get."

The three-hour-plus bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion was de­liv­ered by Fi­nance Min­is­ter Karen Tesheira this af­ter­noon in the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tives at the Red House in Port-of-Spain. The over­all cost of the bud­get was $44.3 bil­lion, down from last year's record-break­ing $49.4 bil­lion. In a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day, Sage­wan-Al­li said the bud­get left much to be de­sired as it failed to ad­e­quate­ly ad­dress the ma­jor is­sues fac­ing the peo­ple and the coun­try.

She said while the pre­sen­ta­tion of the bud­get had changed, its con­tent re­mained the same. "It was a po­lit­i­cal bud­get. The min­is­ter didn't pro­vide a break down of the funds al­lo­cat­ed to the var­i­ous sec­tors," she said. "Last year it was very clear as to how much mon­ey was go­ing where. This year, gov­ern­ment gave us noth­ing be­cause it doesn't want to com­mit to any­thing."

Sage­wan-Al­li said while the min­is­ter ad­mit­ted that the era of cheap food "was be­hind us" and spoke at length about its "grand plans" for the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor, the na­tion's farm­ers con­tin­ued to suf­fer from a lack of re­sources and equip­ment. "Again, we don't even know how much is be­ing al­lo­cat­ed to agri­cul­ture. Gov­ern­ment needs to fo­cus on food se­cu­ri­ty to cre­ate bet­ter op­por­tu­ni­ties for ex­port."

She added that there was a need to di­vert so­cial pro­grammes, such as the Un­em­ploy­ment Re­lief Pro­gramme, and Cepep in­to the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor to al­low work­ers the op­por­tu­ni­ty to "climb the lad­der of suc­cess" and stop the "de­pen­den­cy syn­drome."

Point­ing to the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor, Sage­wan-Al­li lament­ed that the "same old mea­sures" were men­tioned and the min­is­ter gave no re­al in­cen­tives for man­u­fac­tur­ers to em­brace new meth­ods and em­bark on re­search and de­vel­op­ment. Al­li, a for­mer MP, al­so stat­ed that while the min­is­ter "cel­e­brat­ed" the coun­try's tourism sec­tor, she failed to paint a re­al­is­tic pic­ture.

"Imag­ine, she point­ed to the Sum­mit of the Amer­i­c­as, but we paid for that. It did not bring about any rev­enue," she said.

Al­li said the coun­try was still too de­pen­dent on oil and gas and added that ex­plor­ing al­ter­na­tive in­come gen­er­at­ing meth­ods should have been placed on gov­ern­ment's front burn­er.