Yvonne Ba­boolal

Flori­da's Lt Gov­er­nor, Trinidad-born Jen­nifer Car­roll, lead­ing a del­e­ga­tion of 27 Flori­da com­pa­nies, met sev­er­al gov­ern­ment min­is­ters and mem­bers of the busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty dur­ing a week-long stay in T&T. Car­roll told the me­dia at a con­fer­ence at the US Em­bassy yes­ter­day that the pur­pose of the vis­it was to strength­en trade ties and to talk about the up­com­ing US pres­i­den­tial elec­tions.

Car­roll, a Re­pub­li­can, dis­closed that there are 40,000 Trinida­di­ans liv­ing in Flori­da. Last year, 75,000 na­tion­als vis­it­ed the US State, she said. She said she was in­vit­ed by the US State De­part­ment to talk about the US na­tion­al elec­tions in T&T. The main is­sue in the US?elec­tion cam­paign is about jobs in Amer­i­ca, she said. Fur­ther, T&T is Flori­da's largest trad­ing part­ner in the Eng­lish-speak­ing Caribbean, she not­ed.

Flori­da com­pa­nies in the del­e­ga­tion have al­ready met with lo­cal com­pa­nies and made deals, she said. Some com­pa­nies are stay­ing be­hind to ce­ment these deals. Car­roll, not­ing that Flori­da's econ­o­my is mov­ing up and that un­em­ploy­ment there has de­clined from dou­ble-dig­it to sin­gle-dig­it fig­ures, said both coun­tries will mu­tu­al­ly ben­e­fit from these deals. The mis­sion was an ini­tia­tive of the Flori­da gov­ern­ment

She said T&T im­ports a lot of prod­ucts from Flori­da and they are look­ing for a win/win sit­u­a­tion. There was de­mand for pep­pers and co­coa from T&T, she said. Car­roll al­so dis­closed that there was short­age of fer­tilis­ers world­wide and sug­gest­ed that lo­cal com­pa­nies can man­u­fac­ture the prod­uct and ex­port it. She said she met with Na­tion­al?Se­cu­ri­ty Min­is­ter Jack?Warn­er and they spoke about crime and na­tion­al di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion. For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Win­ston Dook­er­an was very in­ter­est­ed in Flori­da's space pro­gramme and talks were held about send­ing as­pir­ing T&T sci­en­tists on a sci­ence sym­po­sium there.