An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers@guardian.co.tt

Min­is­ter in the Min­istry of Fi­nance and Min­is­ter of Plan­ning, Eco­nom­ic Af­fairs and De­vel­op­ment, Dr Kennedy Swarats­ingh yes­ter­day ac­knowl­edged that Trinidad Ce­ment Ltd’s de­ci­sion to raise ce­ment prices will place ad­di­tion­al pres­sure on con­sumers, while stress­ing that con­tin­ued en­gage­ment be­tween Gov­ern­ment and the pri­vate sec­tor re­mains cen­tral to nav­i­gat­ing ris­ing costs in the econ­o­my.

TCL in­formed cus­tomers, in­clud­ing hard­ware stores, con­trac­tors, and house­holds un­der­tak­ing ren­o­va­tions, that the ex-fac­to­ry price of ce­ment bags will rise by 15 per cent from next Mon­day, Feb­ru­ary 9. In a com­mu­ni­ca­tion to a “val­ued cus­tomer”, the Clax­ton Bay-head­quar­tered pro­duc­er linked the in­crease di­rect­ly to high­er en­er­gy costs.
“As the Na­tion­al Gas Com­pa­ny’s pre­vi­ous­ly an­nounced in­crease in nat­ur­al gas prices has now been con­firmed retroac­tive to 1 Jan­u­ary 2026, this is hav­ing a di­rect and sig­nif­i­cant im­pact on TCL’s pro­duc­tion costs,” the com­pa­ny wrote.

“While TCL re­mains deeply con­cerned about the broad­er im­pact of these gas prices on your busi­ness, end users, and the con­struc­tion sec­tor, it ne­ces­si­tates a 15 per cent price ad­just­ment.”

A com­pa­ny source con­firmed that the ref­er­ence to “sacks” in the no­tice meant a stan­dard bag of ce­ment.

Ques­tioned about the pro­posed ce­ment price in­crease out­side of Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day, Swarats­ingh not­ed that price de­ci­sions ul­ti­mate­ly rest with com­pa­nies op­er­at­ing in com­pet­i­tive mar­kets.

“Those are de­ci­sions that they have to make in their own best in­ter­est, giv­en all the cir­cum­stances that are pre­vail­ing. So, they will have to jus­ti­fy their own rea­sons for that,” he said.

At the same time, he main­tained that the Gov­ern­ment’s role is to cre­ate the space for busi­ness­es to func­tion ef­fec­tive­ly while bal­anc­ing wider eco­nom­ic con­sid­er­a­tions.

Asked whether con­sumers should brace for fur­ther price in­creas­es from oth­er com­pa­nies, Swarats­ingh did not rule it out. “There are cir­cum­stances that are go­ing to pre­vail, and we are go­ing to con­stant­ly have to have di­a­logue and make ad­just­ments if the case may be,” he said, de­scrib­ing this as a fea­ture of the pe­ri­od ahead.