Raphael John-Lall

Er­ros See­jat­tan, vice pres­i­dent of the T&T Scrap Iron Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tion, says the group is seek­ing a lev­el play­ing field as they are at a ma­jor dis­ad­van­tage with ma­jor play­ers in the lo­cal mar­ket.

"These big com­pa­nies like West In­di­an Met­als are set up here and they sell scrap met­al to mills in South East Asia. There are al­so for­eign com­pa­nies like Ever­est Met­als. They are very big for­eign com­pa­nies but most of our lo­cal deal­ers are small mom and pop or­gan­i­sa­tions. Com­pet­ing against them are like David and Go­liath all over again," he told the T&T Guardian yes­ter­day.

The T&T Scrap Iron Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tions is hold­ing talks with the for­eign op­er­a­tors and the Min­istry of Trade to find a so­lu­tion. Their next meet­ing with the is sched­uled for next week."We do not want the rest of the world to think that we are hos­tile to for­eign in­vest­ment. We want a fair play­ing field," he said.See­jat­tan said ini­tial­ly the for­eign­ers were on­ly sup­posed to buy from lo­cal deal­ers then ex­port glob­al­ly.

"Now they have set up shop here to squeeze lo­cals from the mar­ket," he said

"We have deal­ers from In­dia, Pak­istan, Ar­genti­na, Chi­na and all over the world. They were sup­posed to come here to buy scrap from us and ship it away. Af­ter the State of Emer­gency in 2011, they asked the gov­ern­ment for li­cences to ship the ma­te­r­i­al away. They got li­cences but it is the same li­cence we have as deal­ers, so in­stead of us­ing to it to ship away they used it to start open­ing their own yards here and cut­ting us out by go­ing di­rect­ly to our cus­tomers. We were un­able to com­pete with them as we sell to them," he said.

See­jat­tan said the for­eign scrap iron deal­ers tried the same thing in oth­er Caribbean is­lands and were moved out of those mar­kets."It is not just in T&T, they are but all over the Caribbean but the oth­er is­lands got them out and they turned to T&T. Af­ter all, T&T is the mec­ca of the Caribbean and we are the most in­dus­tri­alised. It has cre­at­ed com­pe­ti­tion.

"We would like to see con­trol mea­sures in place. There are more peo­ple com­ing in dai­ly and even­tu­al­ly we will be elim­i­nat­ed. They have ac­cess to a lot of mar­kets that we do not have," he said.