There has been an ur­gent ap­peal to Gov­ern­ment from sev­er­al cre­ative and cul­tur­al groups that should not be ig­nored.

They rep­re­sent a sec­tor that has been one of the hard­est hit by the lock­down mea­sures of the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic. The lat­est blow, in the form of a ban on pub­lic gath­er­ings for en­ter­tain­ment pur­pos­es and the clo­sure of per­for­mance spaces, has piled on fur­ther hard­ships.

In an un­prece­dent­ed move, the col­lec­tive voic­es of a di­verse range of artistes, rep­re­sent­ed by the Na­tion­al Dra­ma As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T (NDATT), Trin­ba­go Uni­fied Ca­lyp­so­ni­ans Or­gan­i­sa­tion (TU­CO), San Fer­nan­do Arts Coun­cil, T&T Pro­mot­ers As­so­ci­a­tion, the Tas­sa As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T, and oth­ers, have joined in a des­per­ate cry for help.

The re­stric­tions an­nounced by Health Min­is­ter Ter­rence Deyals­ingh re­sult­ed in the im­me­di­ate can­cel­la­tion or post­pone­ment of shows. These are not mere in­con­ve­niences but the sud­den loss of in­come for per­form­ers who were re­ly­ing on sup­port from spon­sors, in­vestors, and au­di­ences for their pro­duc­tions.

The 50th-an­niver­sary ac­tiv­i­ties planned by the Na­tion­al Parang As­so­ci­a­tion and A Trib­ute Con­cert to Cul­tur­al Dance Icon—Tor­rance Mo­hammed are among the events halt­ed by the lock­down.

While it can be ar­gued that the coro­n­avirus has sent the en­tire world in­to a tail­spin, the re­al­i­ty is that the cur­rent cri­sis de­mands some out-of-the-box think­ing by T&T’s de­ci­sion-mak­ers to pro­tect and pre­serve the sec­tors that will need to be func­tion­ing con­trib­u­tors to the coun­try’s growth and de­vel­op­ment post-COVID.

They should be see­ing the val­ue of the cre­ative in­dus­tries as dri­vers of the in­no­va­tion and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty that will fi­nal­ly bring T&T to that still elu­sive eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion and ex­port growth on which our long-term pros­per­i­ty de­pends.

The artistes now cry­ing out for help be­long to an in­dus­try that had emerged in the pre-pan­dem­ic days as a key growth sec­tor in the re­gion, con­tribut­ing to GDP, ex­ports, and em­ploy­ment. T&T, like many oth­er coun­tries in the Caribbean, has over many decades giv­en to the world recog­nis­able artistes and events, in­clud­ing our very own Car­ni­val.

Be­fore COVID-19, glob­al mar­ket de­mand for cul­tur­al con­tent had been steadi­ly in­creas­ing and the cul­tur­al and cre­ative in­dus­tries sec­tor had been one of the fastest-grow­ing sec­tors of the world econ­o­my. This coun­try’s de­ci­sion-mak­ers can­not lose sight of that fact.

Not too long ago, when plung­ing en­er­gy prices put di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion high on the na­tion­al agen­da, the Cre­ative In­dus­tries Com­pa­ny Lim­it­ed (Cre­ativeTT) was put for­ward as the state en­ter­prise that would “stim­u­late and fa­cil­i­tate the busi­ness de­vel­op­ment and ex­port ac­tiv­i­ties of the cre­ative in­dus­tries in T&T to gen­er­ate na­tion­al wealth.”

Cre­ativeTT was seen as part of a vi­sion to po­si­tion T&T’s cre­ative in­dus­tries as key com­po­nents of our long-term eco­nom­ic sus­tain­abil­i­ty.

But now it seems, in the face of COVID-19's de­bil­i­tat­ing ef­fect on the in­dus­try, that the agency is dor­mant.

Ear­li­er on in the pan­dem­ic, Cre­ativeTT had enun­ci­at­ed a plan “to at­tract new in­vest­ment in the cre­ative sec­tor, util­is­ing the lat­est tech­nol­o­gy and a move to more ef­fi­cient ways of con­duc­tion train­ing ses­sions, and pro­grammes by mov­ing to on­line plat­forms for we­bi­na­rs, train­ing ses­sions.”

With so many in the in­dus­try on the brink of fail­ure, it is time to shift that plan in­to high gear.