GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

With­in a mat­ter of hours, Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert will present his 2024 fis­cal pack­age in Par­lia­ment.

In the Fi­nance Min­is­ter’s bag of good­ies, there is much ex­pec­ta­tion that or­di­nary cit­i­zens will get some re­lief in their pock­ets, with the hope that the min­i­mum wage may be in­creased. The cur­rent min­i­mum wage stands at $17.50.

Ad­dress­ing what Im­bert could de­liv­er to bring re­lief, econ­o­mist Dr In­dera Sage­wan told Guardian Me­dia giv­en the fact that T&T is one year away from a gen­er­al elec­tion and not­ing the out­come of the Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Elec­tions in Au­gust, there could be a sig­nif­i­cant al­lo­ca­tion to the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port to gen­er­ate much-need­ed em­ploy­ment.

“Road works tend to be a strong ‘sweet­en­er’ in the sense that it gen­er­ates jobs at the low­er-in­come lev­el...Even though pre­vi­ous bud­gets have iden­ti­fied a lot of road projects, we will ac­tu­al­ly see that hap­pen­ing in this fis­cal year,” Sage­wan said.

While she not­ed that this year’s pat­tern of al­lo­ca­tion would not be dif­fer­ent from pre­vi­ous ones, Sage­wan be­lieves there will, how­ev­er, be more ef­fort from the Gov­ern­ment.

Ad­dress­ing crime is an­oth­er big-tick­et item, Sage­wan said, adding that na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty will fac­tor heav­i­ly in the bud­get.

“I think that giv­en the ex­tent of crime and the ex­tent that it is a run-away, there will be a lot of em­pha­sis on crime,” she said.

Sage­wan said she was al­so “very in­ter­est­ed” in what Im­bert was peg­ging his fis­cal pack­age on in terms of the prices of oil and gas.

“That would send a sig­nal about what he would do in terms of the Her­itage and Sta­bil­i­sa­tion Fund (HSF). The high­er the price that he projects will sig­ni­fy his look­ing to­wards ac­cess­ing mon­ey out of the HSF,” Sage­wan added.

The last bud­get was pegged at an oil price of US$92.50 per bar­rel and a gas price of US$6.00 per MMB­tu.

To­tal ex­pen­di­ture for fis­cal 2023 was bud­get­ed at $57.685 bil­lion.

She al­so be­lieved the coun­try will al­so see an­oth­er bud­get deficit this year.

“For sure, there will be an­oth­er deficit bud­get be­cause look at what is hap­pen­ing with the price of oil and gas. They are de­clin­ing and the pro­jec­tion of gas has not been re­alised,” she added.

T&T has had bud­get deficits for the past 15 years.

The deficit for 2023 and ahead in­to 2024 is like­ly to be small­er, build­ing on the $329 mil­lion deficit of 2022 as the Gov­ern­ment moves to­ward its goal of a bal­anced bud­get.

The deficits since the 2016 fis­cal year have been as fol­lows: 2016—$7.97 bil­lion, 2017—$13.53 bil­lion, 2018—$5.69 bil­lion, 2019—$4.02 bil­lion, 2020—$16.68 bil­lion, 2021—$13.74 bil­lion, and 2022—$0.329 bil­lion.

With all eyes on Im­bert as he de­liv­ers his ninth bud­get to­day, farm­ers are al­so hop­ing for more in­cen­tives to grow the sec­tor.

With the se­vere im­pact of cli­mate change fur­ther af­fect­ing the agri­cul­ture sec­tor as each year pass­es, for­mer head of the Fac­ul­ty of Agri­cul­ture at UWI, St Au­gus­tine, Dr Wayne Gan­pat, is hop­ing that Gov­ern­ment will im­ple­ment mea­sures to ad­dress this.

“Cli­mate change is up­on us and we can tell the ef­fects of it right now. It is very vis­i­ble and ap­par­ent and those are warn­ing signs that things are get­ting pro­gres­sive­ly worse,” he ex­plained.

Say­ing there needs to be a greater ef­fort by Gov­ern­ment at fos­ter­ing the na­tion­al food agen­da, Gan­pat said these need to be seen in par­tic­u­lar ar­eas.

“We re­al­ly need to have some por­tion of our land recul­ti­vat­ed to get rice pro­duc­tion up. We need some in­vest­ment in the small ru­mi­nants sec­tor and we need to get peo­ple more in­volved in rab­bit and quail pro­duc­tion,” he ad­vised.