GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

Se­nior Re­porter

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

The T&T busi­ness com­mu­ni­ty cur­rent­ly faces a stark set of op­er­a­tional re­al­i­ties: per­sis­tent for­eign ex­change con­straints; a ris­ing cost of do­ing busi­ness across en­er­gy and lo­gis­tics; sig­nif­i­cant weak­ness­es in trade fa­cil­i­ta­tion and port ef­fi­cien­cy; skills and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty gaps; as well as lim­it­ed ac­cess to growth fi­nance and mar­ket in­tel­li­gence, par­tic­u­lar­ly for firms with the am­bi­tion to ex­port but with­out the in­sti­tu­tion­al sup­port re­quired to scale.

These core chal­lenges, com­pound­ed by a do­mes­tic re­liance on the en­er­gy sec­tor and de­clin­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, formed part of Karen Yip Chuck’s in­au­gur­al ad­dress as pres­i­dent of the T&T Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce yes­ter­day.

Speak­ing to a high-lev­el as­sem­bly at the Hy­att Re­gency, Port-of-Spain, which in­clud­ed Guyanese Pres­i­dent Dr Mo­hamed Ir­faan Ali, Yip Chuck char­ac­terised the cur­rent en­vi­ron­ment as a time of pro­found glob­al dis­rup­tion.

To ad­dress these hur­dles, Yip Chuck out­lined a shift from the Cham­ber’s 147-year his­to­ry of ad­vo­ca­cy to­wards a strat­e­gy of en­gi­neered com­pet­i­tive­ness. She as­sert­ed that the pri­vate sec­tor must lead this re­set by mov­ing be­yond con­ver­sa­tion in­to ex­e­cu­tion.

The Cham­ber’s new man­date is de­signed to func­tion as an “eco­nom­ic nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem”, specif­i­cal­ly tar­get­ing five pil­lars of val­ue: busi­ness re­silience through risk in­tel­li­gence; trade and sup­ply chain so­lu­tions; eco­nom­ic di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion and sec­tor de­vel­op­ment; pol­i­cy lead­er­ship; and the sur­vival of small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es (SMEs).

A key ob­jec­tive of this new ad­min­is­tra­tion is al­so the ex­pan­sion of mar­ket ac­cess through re­gion­al and glob­al con­nec­tiv­i­ty.

“Through CARICHAM, the net­work of Caribbean cham­bers, we are build­ing stronger busi­ness con­nec­tiv­i­ty across the re­gion and ac­tive­ly de­vel­op­ing a Caribbean Ex­port Acad­e­my, to be an­chored here in T&T. That is a sig­nif­i­cant achieve­ment, and one we do not take light­ly.

“Through ac­tive part­ner­ships with em­bassies and high com­mis­sions based here in Trinidad and To­ba­go, as well as our af­fil­i­a­tions with cham­bers of com­merce in the Unit­ed King­dom, Eu­ro­pean Union, the Unit­ed States, Colom­bia, Turkey and oth­er strate­gic mar­kets, we are build­ing re­al, rec­i­p­ro­cal busi­ness cor­ri­dors.

These are work­ing mech­a­nisms for in­tro­duc­tions, mar­ket in­tel­li­gence, trade fa­cil­i­ta­tion, and in­vestor en­gage­ment,” Yip Chuck ex­plained.

The pres­i­dent al­so em­pha­sised that this re­vi­tal­i­sa­tion re­quires a dual-track ap­proach: the pub­lic sec­tor must en­able growth through pol­i­cy and in­fra­struc­ture, but the pri­vate sec­tor must dri­ve the re­sults.

“The ques­tion is whether we are pre­pared to ex­e­cute be­cause what we are fac­ing is not in­cre­men­tal change. It is a cor­po­rate-lev­el turn­around of T&T’s econ­o­my.

• A re­set in how we pro­duce; how we com­pete; how we think.

• And a re­set in how we po­si­tion our­selves in the glob­al mar­ket.

• And turn­arounds are not built on com­fort. They are built on dis­ci­pline, align­ment, and ac­count­abil­i­ty.

So let me be equal­ly clear. The pri­vate sec­tor must lead,” Yip Chuck out­lined.

She al­so is­sued a call to the na­tion’s large con­glom­er­ates to ac­tive­ly men­tor and in­vest in the SME “en­gine room”, ar­gu­ing that na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment is on­ly pos­si­ble when the en­tire busi­ness ecosys­tem is strength­ened.