As our hy­dro­car­bon sec­tor strug­gles to pro­vide the im­pe­tus to the do­mes­tic econ­o­my as it did in the past why do we, Gov­ern­ment and oth­er stake­hold­ers, fail to even pick the "low hang­ing fruits?" This while we de­vel­op the di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion plans and pro­grammes for the medi­um and long run? In the Sun­day Guardian of Feb­ru­ary 23, 2020, Tony Fras­er laments our fail­ure to do just that. He says "Car­ni­val or­gan­i­sa­tion re­mains at the am­a­teur and beg­ging-bowl lev­el. It’s a fail­ure to con­ceive of the fes­ti­val as an eco­nom­ic en­ter­prise in which the state in­vests in the in­fra­struc­ture as States here and every­where else pro­vide the base for the de­vel­op­ment of en­ter­prise and pro­duc­tion and in the in­ter­na­tion­al mar­ket­ing of the fes­ti­val.

"One des­per­ate fail­ing con­tin­ues to be the ab­sence of lo­cal pri­vate en­tre­pre­neur­ship in the Car­ni­val."

I wish to add to the de­bate in the hope of help­ing to spur ac­tion. I ful­ly agree with Tony. For too long, non-en­er­gy ex­pan­sion has large­ly been ole’ talk masked as di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion plans. While di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion does in­volve sus­tained work in re­search and de­vel­op­ment of ex­ist­ing prod­ucts and ser­vices, at an­oth­er lev­el it sim­ply de­mands lead­er­ship in the time­ly co­or­di­na­tion of ef­forts by ex­ist­ing state agen­cies. Was that not the case of the stage at Mara­cas Bay or the over­crowd­ed par­ty boat stopped by po­lice? In my view, these were just two events that if han­dled dif­fer­ent­ly could have brought all-round ben­e­fits as a sig­nif­i­cant in­dige­nous and all-in­clu­sive area of eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty.

And to Tony’s sec­ond point, were these events not pri­vate sec­tor in­vest­ment ef­forts which were hin­dered rather than helped by poor vi­sion­ing, co­or­di­na­tion and sup­port by state agen­cies? In­deed what these two ex­am­ples demon­strate is that a vi­sion­ary and or­ga­nized state pro­vid­ing the nec­es­sary co­or­di­na­tion and in­fra­struc­ture would like­ly at­tract the req­ui­site pri­vate sec­tor in­vest­ment which to­geth­er can make all the dif­fer­ence in the pro­mo­tion of much need­ed eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ty to com­ple­ment all our oth­er bless­ings.

Ronald Ramkissoon PhD,

Econ­o­mist