To­day's Ed­i­to­r­i­al

There was no ques­tion that Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar quick­ly and ac­cu­rate­ly read the tea leaves of pub­lic opin­ion af­ter her sur­pris­ing de­ci­sion to at­tach con­di­tions to this coun­try's re­sponse to is­lands rav­aged by the pass­ing of Hur­ri­cane Tomas. The Prime Min­is­ter was al­most im­me­di­ate­ly found in pic­tures in­spect­ing goods be­ing pre­pared for ship­ment to af­flict­ed Caribbean is­lands.

Putting shoe leather to re­vers­ing per­cep­tions, the PM donned her metaphor­i­cal dis­as­ter in­spec­tion boots, fly­ing ahead of a ship­ment of sup­plies to St Lu­cia, which now faces a stag­ger­ing $3bil­lion price tag for its restora­tion ef­fort. There would be no Di­vali deyas for this Prime Min­is­ter, now on a mis­sion to re­verse the po­ten­tial­ly dam­ag­ing groundswell of re­gion­al re­jec­tion of the pro­posed "friends with strings" com­pact that was sug­gest­ed by this Gov­ern­ment as a re­sponse to is­lands stripped bare of their in­come gen­er­at­ing crops and flood­ed with mud­dy wa­ter.

In­stead of cheer­ful Shubh Di­vali greet­ings, Prime Min­is­ter Per­sad-Bisses­sar was pic­tured frown­ing on the front­lines of storm wrought dis­as­ter bear­ing ham­pers of crit­i­cal ne­ces­si­ties in St Lu­cia on Fri­day, ac­com­pa­nied by pri­vate sec­tor pro­fes­sion­als, min­is­ters and gov­ern­ment tech­nocrats.

The tru­ly sur­pris­ing thing about the shock­ing an­nounce­ment was both how in­ept­ly it was phrased and pre­pared for prime min­is­te­r­i­al elo­cu­tion and how pre­dictable the re­sponse to it was. The ex­pand­ed ex­pla­na­tions in the wake of the ini­tial pub­lic re­la­tions dis­as­ter be­gan to tease some kind of sense out of what had seemed to be a blunt state­ment of cold­heart­ed­ness, but to date, there has been far too lit­tle clar­i­ty about what ex­act­ly the Gov­ern­ment has in mind for its fu­ture ap­proach to lend­ing re­gion­al sup­port to nat­ur­al dis­as­ters.

Some busi­ness pro­fes­sion­als have stepped for­ward in sup­port of the ini­tia­tive, but there re­mains much to be ex­plained for a re­gion­al au­di­ence that is ap­palled by the Prime Min­is­ter's state­ment.

Trinidad and To­ba­go hasn't done a par­tic­u­lar­ly good job of cre­at­ing an in­ter­nal dis­as­ter re­sponse strat­e­gy ca­pa­ble of re­spond­ing to lo­cal in­ci­dents of flood­ing.

Per­haps a project that builds a dis­as­ter re­sponse ca­pac­i­ty scaled for is­lands in the Caribbean can­not help but for­ti­fy what we're try­ing to build for our­selves. How would such a Gov­ern­ment's strat­e­gy play out in the heat of dis­as­ter re­sponse ef­forts? Were the Coast Guard ves­sels bring­ing goods to St Lu­cia an ex­pres­sion of the new ap­proach? Far from step­ping back from pre­vi­ous stan­dards of re­gion­al aid, the Prime Min­is­ter's still to be ful­ly formed ap­proach of­fers op­por­tu­ni­ties to raise dis­as­ter re­sponse from be­ing led by the pub­lic sec­tor and mak­ing it an ini­tia­tive that in­vites par­tic­i­pa­tion from the pri­vate sec­tor and pub­lic at large.

If the fo­cus is shift­ed from the per­spec­tives of donor to that of the re­cip­i­ent, what peo­ple in a sit­u­a­tion of nat­ur­al dis­as­ter need is the or­gan­i­sa­tion, clar­i­ty of think­ing and needs dri­ven ap­proach­es that a prop­er re­sponse team can bring to sit­u­a­tions of chaos.

What's need­ed is a mech­a­nism, over­seen by the Gov­ern­ment but en­abled by vol­un­teer ef­forts, to build an in­fra­struc­ture that iden­ti­fies dis­as­ter re­sources, pro­vides struc­tures that can ware­house them for dis­tri­b­u­tion and moves quick­ly to re­spond when des­per­ate sit­u­a­tions arise. There's no point stock­pil­ing goods that will de­te­ri­o­rate when they aren't need­ed.

Cor­po­rate en­ti­ties might pledge a cer­tain val­ue of goods and ser­vices that would be de­liv­ered for dis­tri­b­u­tion on­ly when they are re­quire. Pro­fes­sion­als, from doc­tors to ar­chi­tects, might of­fer their ser­vices on call for sit­u­a­tions in which they are called on and ship­ping and trans­port ser­vices might par­tic­i­pate by mak­ing a cer­tain val­ue of ser­vices avail­able when they are need­ed.

Per­haps there might be a tax mech­a­nism that kicks in when the pledged re­sources are put in­to play that would al­low busi­ness­es to of­fer these ser­vices un­der the rubric of for­mal char­i­ty.

Such an ini­tia­tive might well find it­self well stocked with vir­tu­al re­sources that it can in­voke when need­ed with­out hav­ing to deal with per­son­nel and stock­ing is­sues when things are go­ing well.

If the Prime Min­is­ter is de­ter­mined to ab­solve the ef­fect of those first words on the de­struc­tion wrought by Tomas, she must re­place them with more res­o­nant, last­ing state­ments that bring re­al and sus­tain­able val­ue to dis­as­ter vic­tims both at home and abroad.