Rishard Khan

rishard.khan@guardian.co.tt

Many of the 16,547 mi­cro, small and medi­um en­ter­pris­es in T&T which em­ploys around 90,000 per­sons have al­ready restart­ed op­er­a­tions ac­cord­ing to Min­is­ter of Trade and In­dus­try Paula Gopee-Scoon.

Speak­ing dur­ing a Min­istry of Health vir­tu­al press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Scoon said: "We re­main par­tic­u­lar­ly con­cerned of the im­pact of COVID on the MSMEs giv­en their im­por­tant con­tri­bu­tion to the econ­o­my."

How­ev­er, she as­sured that she has been meet­ing with the var­i­ous cham­bers of com­merce to ad­dress var­i­ous is­sues aris­ing out of the pan­dem­ic; es­pe­cial­ly the MSMEs.

She al­so not­ed that a look at da­ta from the Cen­tral Sta­tis­ti­cal Of­fice as well as the var­i­ous sec­tors in­di­cate that "a con­sid­er­able amount of MSMEs are al­ready back in busi­ness and per­sons en­gaged in em­ploy­ment in those sec­tors and sub­sec­tors."

Min­is­ter Gopee-Scoon al­so in­di­cat­ed that the main chal­lenge now is get­ting all the var­i­ous busi­ness­es busi­ness­es back on track in the short­est pos­si­ble pe­ri­od "with­out erod­ing the gains made in main­tain­ing the pub­lic health en­vi­ron­ment over the last two months."

She cau­tioned that this was an im­por­tant con­sid­er­a­tion go­ing for­ward.

"Peo­ple talk about en­sur­ing lives (are pre­served) and we must move on to liveli­hoods but one does not ex­ist with­out the oth­er. Be­cause you can’t have liveli­hoods with­out lives, cus­tomers will come in­to your or­ga­ni­za­tion…you must have lives in or­der to main­tain liveli­hoods," Gopee-Scoon said.

Min­is­ter Gopee-Scoon al­so added that the man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor is go­ing be look at to di­ver­si­fy the coun­try's econ­o­my away from tra­di­tion­al oil and gas.

"The man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor works well and there­fore that's the place to go," she said.

She al­so said the agri­cul­ture sec­tor is an­oth­er vi­able op­tion for ex­pan­sion in the at­tempt to di­ver­si­fy the econ­o­my.