To­tal out­put in man­u­fac­tur­ing in 2022 is fore­cast at ap­prox­i­mate­ly $28.1 bil­lion. Of that, food and bev­er­age is ex­pect­ed to be the largest com­po­nent (28 per cent), ac­cord­ing to Trade Min­is­ter Paula Gopee-Scoon.

In terms of ex­port per­for­mance, she not­ed non-en­er­gy ex­ports in­creased by 1.8 per cent while non-en­er­gy man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor ex­ports in­creased by 24 per cent.

This lev­el of ex­ports in fis­cal 2022 was al­so 46 per cent high­er than fis­cal 2019, the min­is­ter said dur­ing the Pres­i­dent’s Din­ner and Awards Cer­e­mo­ny host­ed by the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion on Tues­day night.

Not­ing that trade is a crit­i­cal en­gine that dri­ves eco­nom­ic and so­cial trans­for­ma­tion in T&T, Gopee-Scoon said glob­al dis­rup­tions have re­sult­ed in the need for di­verse, flex­i­ble and more in­te­grat­ed sup­ply chains to “first and fore­most to feed our­selves” and to make avail­able es­sen­tial items with­in the re­gion.

To sup­port this the Min­istry of Trade and In­dus­try will un­der­take two key stud­ies.

The first is to bol­ster the growth tra­jec­to­ry of the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor through the strength­en­ing of sec­toral link­ages in T&T.

Ac­cord­ing to Gopee-Scoon this would in­volve a di­ag­nos­tic as­sess­ment of the link­ages with­in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor par­tic­u­lar­ly, agri­cul­ture, man­u­fac­tur­ing, cre­ative in­dus­tries and tourism to specif­i­cal­ly iden­ti­fy op­por­tu­ni­ties for im­port sub­sti­tu­tion and man­u­fac­tur­ing.

It is ex­pect­ed to in­crease do­mes­tic pro­duc­tion and ex­ports and con­tribute to val­ue-added prod­ucts and ser­vices in the non-en­er­gy sec­tor.

The sec­ond study fo­cus­es on the de­vel­op­ment of re­gion­al val­ue chains for the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor.

Gopee-Scoon ex­plained the ob­jec­tive is to map ex­ist­ing re­gion­al val­ue chains (both for­ward and back­ward link­ages) of the sec­tor, in­clu­sive of food and bev­er­age, chem­i­cal and print­ing and pack­ag­ing, to iden­ti­fy new op­por­tu­ni­ties at in­creas­ing the re­gion­al in­te­gra­tion of pro­duc­tion.

“With­in the lo­cal con­text, this ini­tia­tive will en­able our man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor to es­tab­lish and di­ver­si­fy sup­ply chains through­out mul­ti­ple re­gion­al sources of raw ma­te­ri­als, pro­duc­tion lo­ca­tions, and ware­house hubs and dis­tri­b­u­tion chan­nels,” the min­is­ter fur­ther ex­plained.

She al­so not­ed that well-de­vel­oped ro­bust re­gion­al val­ue chains, par­tic­u­lar­ly in agri­cul­ture and agro-pro­cess­ing can sup­port deep­ened pro­duc­tion in­te­gra­tion and will en­sure that Cari­com’s goal to re­duce the re­gion’s food im­port bill by 25 per cent by 2025 is with­in reach.