His­to­ry is re­plete of ex­am­ples of na­tion­al, state, and pri­vate sec­tor projects that have been dis­mal fail­ures. In the case of the pri­vate sec­tor projects the share­hold­ers/in­vestors bear the loss and in the case of na­tion­al and state projects the pop­u­la­tion/tax­pay­ers bear the loss. From the lessons learned from a re­view of ma­jor mega projects the fail­ures can of­ten­times be traced to a weak de­ci­sion-mak­ing process.

The cost of im­port­ing food in­to T&T has in­creased dra­mat­i­cal­ly in re­cent years. In 2024, it was es­ti­mat­ed at over $7.3 bil­lion. This sum il­lus­trates the na­tion’s heavy re­liance on food im­ports to meet its do­mes­tic de­mands, which have grown over time from an av­er­age of about $5 bil­lion in the past. Due to poor soils, in­suf­fi­cient in­fra­struc­ture, re­strict­ed ac­cess to tech­nol­o­gy, cli­mate vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, and low in­vest­ment, agri­cul­tur­al pro­duc­tiv­i­ty is con­strained in many de­vel­op­ing na­tions, in­clud­ing T&T.

On Sep­tem­ber 4, Gov­er­nor of the Cen­tral Bank of T&T, Lar­ry Howai, held an en­gage­ment with the lo­cal me­dia dur­ing which he re­vealed that the Bank’s in­ter­ven­tion in T&T’s for­eign ex­change mar­ket amount­ed to about US$2.2 bil­lion a year. That mon­ey, he con­firmed, comes from the coun­try’s for­eign re­serves.

The im­me­di­ate ad­den­dum to last week’s col­umn is that Ja­maica’s net for­eign re­serves is high­er than that of Trinidad and To­ba­go. Let that re­al­i­ty sink in for a mo­ment. The same Ja­maica that is sup­posed to be un­der the IMF “bo­gey man” ac­tu­al­ly has more for­eign cur­ren­cy re­serves (ex­clud­ing our Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund) than T&T and this is so even when you fac­tor in some lev­el of ar­ti­fi­cial de­mand in Ja­maica com­ing as a re­sult of the for­eign ex­change poli­cies in T&T.

Walk in­to any su­per­mar­ket aisle or scroll through your favourite feed and you’ll see it: a kalei­do­scope of “eco-friend­ly”, “car­bon-neu­tral”, and “green” claims vy­ing for at­ten­tion. Sus­tain­abil­i­ty has moved from the CSR page to the head­line of the ad. The ques­tion for mar­keters is no longer whether to en­gage with the green econ­o­my, but how to do it cred­i­bly, prof­itably and in a way that ac­tu­al­ly shifts be­hav­iour.

Young pro­fes­sion­als in Trinidad and To­ba­go are strug­gling to nav­i­gate the mine­field that is the re­al es­tate mar­ket in the coun­try.

For­mer trade min­is­ter Vas­ant Bharath said CAL’s re­cent de­ci­sion to tem­porar­i­ly halt flights de­ci­sion cou­pled with few­er Venezue­lan ves­sels at T&T’s ports are “trou­bling.”

Da­ta from the T&T Oc­cu­pa­tion­al Safe­ty and Health Au­thor­i­ty shows a down­ward trend in re­port­ed ac­ci­dents from the fis­cal year 2018/19 to the present across all eco­nom­ic ac­tiv­i­ties.

High Court Judge Kevin Ram­cha­ran will have to re­con­sid­er his de­ci­sion to ap­prove the sig­nif­i­cant fees claimed by the joint liq­uida­tors of CL Fi­nan­cial (CLF) for the work they did in 2019. 

Min­is­ter of Trade, In­vest­ment and Tourism, Satyaka­ma Ma­haraj, is urg­ing the lo­cal busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty to fo­cus on tan­gi­ble, mea­sur­able ac­tions that lead to re­al-world re­sults through its ESG (En­vi­ron­men­tal, So­cial, and Gov­er­nance) pro­grammes.

Pop­u­lar laun­dry de­ter­gent brand Breeze will soon not be un­der the um­brel­la of Unilever Caribbean Ltd (UCL).

The Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice has an­nounced that the in­fla­tion rate for Au­gust 2025, which mea­sures the per­cent­age change in the all items in­dex for the month of Au­gust 2025 over Au­gust 2024, was 1.4 per cent.