AN­GE­LO JE­DIDI­AH

an­ge­lo.je­didi­ah@guardian.co.tt

Fol­low­ing sharp crit­i­cism from St Vin­cent and the Grenadines Prime Min­is­ter Dr Ralph Gon­salves over the use of the TT dol­lar in re­gion­al trade, econ­o­mist Pro­fes­sor Roger Ho­sein has main­tained that his com­ments were un­der­stand­able but un­for­tu­nate.

Last month, at the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny of the 77th Or­gan­i­sa­tion of East­ern Caribbean States (OECS) Meet­ing, new­ly ap­point­ed OECS chair­man Dr Gon­salves con­demned T&T’s fail­ure to set­tle a “miser­ly” US$4 mil­lion debt owed to his coun­try for agri­cul­tur­al goods.

Gon­salves said the pro­pos­al he got from Port-of-Spain is that the re­ceiv­able should be paid in TTD—cur­ren­cy he says has no val­ue out­side of T&T.

He added that it might as well be com­pared to “Mo­nop­oly mon­ey,” if brought to St Vin­cent and the Grenadines.

“This in­jus­tice has caused ma­te­r­i­al dif­fi­cul­ties to farm­ers and agri-traders in my coun­try. Our coun­try pays T&T an­nu­al­ly in ex­cess of US$65mil­lion. We (are) pay­ing hard for­eign cur­ren­cy for vis­i­ble ex­ports from Trinidad, main­ly pe­tro­le­um prod­ucts and man­u­fac­tured goods … this is ab­solute­ly un­fair and ridicu­lous,” Dr Gon­salves said.

While Pro­fes­sor Ho­sein ac­knowl­edged that T&T’s for­eign ex­change short­age is a se­ri­ous con­cern for the na­tion and the lo­cal SME sec­tor, he pushed back on any char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion of the TTD as worth­less.

“It’s un­for­tu­nate, the use of the term Mo­nop­oly mon­ey. We are not in that ter­ri­ble po­si­tion. But from the per­spec­tive of the home coun­tries, like St Vin­cent, the mon­ey has no val­ue. So you can kind of sym­pa­thise with why they may be think­ing that way. But our mon­ey is not Mo­nop­oly mon­ey,” Ho­sein said while ap­pear­ing on CNC3’s The Morn­ing Brew pro­gramme on yes­ter­day.

He says while the for­eign ex­change prob­lem will con­tin­ue for the next three to five years, T&T main­tains a strong per capi­ta GDP and re­mains a lead­ing en­er­gy pro­duc­er in the re­gion.

“We are still a strong play­er. But we have a lot of ground­work to do to fix the struc­ture of pro­duc­tion, struc­ture of em­ploy­ment and struc­ture of ex­ports.”

Ho­sein al­so echoed calls for the de­vel­op­ment of a broad­er re­gion­al pay­ments sys­tem—specif­i­cal­ly the pro­posed Cari­com Pay­ments and Set­tle­ment Sys­tem, to of­fer an “in­tra-Cari­com al­ter­na­tive” for coun­tries strug­gling with ac­cess to for­eign ex­change.

His com­ments fol­low news that the cen­tral banks of Bar­ba­dos and The Ba­hamas have suc­cess­ful­ly ex­e­cut­ed a cross-bor­der trans­ac­tion di­rect­ly us­ing their lo­cal cur­ren­cies, elim­i­nat­ing the need for a third-par­ty cur­ren­cy like the US dol­lar.