Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials have said that the ear­ly Sun­day morn­ing raid by the De­fence Force and the Min­istry of Works on the in­for­mal scrap-met­al busi­ness­es in Beetham Gar­dens was based on cred­i­ble in­tel­li­gence that linked the en­ter­prise to the il­le­gal man­u­fac­ture of guns. Al­though the sol­diers and the trucks from the Min­istry of Works re­mained on the site for well over 12 hours-and cart­ed away many truck­loads of scrap met­al to an met­al foundry in Point Lisas-there were no im­me­di­ate re­ports that any il­le­gal items had been seized dur­ing the raid. Sev­er­al is­sues have been raised by the raid and seizure.

First­ly, the al­most re­flex re­sponse by many of those af­fect­ed by the strong arm of the State dur­ing the state of emer­gency that this ac­tion was dis­crim­i­na­to­ry.

Ac­cord­ing to John Ren­nie, he lost $30,000 worth of items and he "can't un­der­stand how peo­ple in Ca­roni and every­where have con­tain­ers all round dem area but dem ent do­ing them noth­ing. This whole thing like it based on pol­i­tics-they know Beetham is PNM." At some point, the Gov­ern­ment ought to ad­dress this per­cep­tion of un­fair treat­ment, which is tinged with racial over­tones and is alive in many of those who have been neg­a­tive­ly af­fect­ed by the state of emer­gency. The sec­ond point com­ing out of the Guardian's re­port­ing of the raid was made by Laven­tille East/Mor­vant Mem­ber of Par­lia­ment Don­na Cox, who in­sist­ed that the road­side busi­ness­es were le­git­i­mate. "It seems they're not on­ly clear­ing up crime, but the scrap met­al al­so. But since peo­ple have le­git­i­mate busi­ness, we want­ed to know what will hap­pen to the con­fis­cat­ed ma­te­r­i­al," she said. And the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al, Anand Ram­logam, af­firmed that if these busi­ness­men pro­duced valid li­cences and re­ceipts for the scrap met­al, they would in fact be com­pen­sat­ed.

But the point needs to be made that through­out the Caribbean the scrap met­al busi­ness has been as­so­ci­at­ed with il­le­gal­i­ty. Here in T&T, ma­jor­i­ty state-owned TSTT has been plagued by thieves who cut the cop­per wire sup­ply­ing thou­sands of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions ser­vices to hun­dreds if not thou­sands of busi­ness­es to re­trieve the cop­per that fetch­es thou­sands of dol­lars on the black-mar­ket ex­port trade.

In Ja­maica, a grey-mar­ket trade in scrap met­al con­tin­ued for decades un­til, in May, ban­dits there made off with a bronze stat­ue sculpt­ed by Ed­na Man­ley, called "The Trees Are Joy­ful," at Uni­ty House in Run­away Bay, St Ann. Giv­en Ed­na Man­ley's leg­endary sta­tus as a Ja­maican artist, as wife of one Ja­maican Prime Min­is­ter and the moth­er of an­oth­er, that would have been the branch that broke the don­key's back.

The sculp­ture, ac­cord­ing to news­pa­per re­ports, was hand­ed over to for­mer In­dus­try, In­vest­ment and Com­merce Min­is­ter Karl Samu­da af­ter he made an im­pas­sioned plea to the lead­ers of the scrap-met­al trade. On Ju­ly 25, about six weeks fol­low­ing the re­turn of the bronze stat­ue-which would have been smelt­ed and sold for the in­trin­sic val­ue of the com­mod­i­ty with­out the least re­gard to the his­tor­i­cal val­ue of the work of art-the Ja­maican Gov­ern­ment slapped a per­ma­nent ban on the ex­port of scrap met­als.

There was sig­nif­i­cant con­cern about Ja­maican his­tor­i­cal arte­facts, in­clud­ing can­nons, be­ing stolen for their met­al.

Less than a week af­ter the Ja­maican Gov­ern­ment ac­tion, the Gov­ern­ment of the Ba­hamas im­posed a tem­po­rary ban on the ex­port of scrap met­als. While the fac­tu­al ba­sis in T&T may not be the same as in our north Caribbean neigh­bours-giv­en the ex­is­tence of a great deal of scrap met­al here-the un­der­ly­ing mes­sage is that the Gov­ern­ment needs to reg­u­late the scrap-met­al in­dus­try. A start would be to ac­knowl­edge its ex­is­tence, view it as a source of ur­ban en­tre­pre­neur­ship and, per­haps, cre­ate a space for it with­in one of the in­dus­tri­al es­tates for which state-owned in­vest­ment pro­mo­tion agency, ETecK, is re­spon­si­ble. Such think­ing would re­move the scrap-met­al busi­ness from the verge of a ma­jor high­way and would cre­ate a new, le­git­i­mate source of rev­enue for the Gov­ern­ment.