Der­ren Joseph

Last week, the Uni­ver­si­ty of Trinidad and To­ba­go (UTT) to­geth­er with Mr Say­eed Ema­mali host­ed a con­fer­ence on the Busi­ness of Car­ni­val at the Na­tion­al Acad­e­my for the Per­form­ing Arts. It brought to­geth­er an im­pres­sive list of stake­hold­ers from the in­dus­try and the de­bate did not dis­ap­point. The Per­ma­nent Sec­re­taries from both the Min­istry of Arts and Mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism, and the Min­istry of Sci­ence Tech­nol­o­gy and Ter­tiary Ed­u­ca­tion at­tend­ed the open­ing ses­sion of the first day. Min­is­ter Win­ston "Gyp­sy" Pe­ters made a brief ap­pear­ance. I see this con­fer­ence as very well timed giv­en that we have a new gov­ern­ment open to new ideas. A cou­ple weeks ago, I was hav­ing a ro­bust de­bate in the gym, Fit­ness Cen­tre, one morn­ing. The top­ic was tourism and my friend was say­ing that we need to de­vel­op our phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture to bring it on par with com­pet­ing des­ti­na­tions.

My view was that while we do need to up­grade phys­i­cal in­fra­struc­ture, pri­or­i­ty should be giv­en (es­pe­cial­ly since funds are not un­lim­it­ed) to soft­er "prod­uct de­vel­op­ment" op­por­tu­ni­ties–es­pe­cial­ly com­mu­ni­ty tourism, fes­ti­vals and stake­hold­er in­sti­tu­tion­al strength­en­ing. It is about pick­ing the low­est hang­ing fruit first. This is un­doubt­ed­ly a hot de­bate now with­in the wider in­dus­try. So it is with this mind­set I at­tend­ed the UTT con­fer­ence last week. Par­tic­i­pants un­der­stood the task ahead of us from an eco­nom­ic point of view. We as a na­tion, have al­most all our eggs in a sin­gle bas­ket–the en­er­gy in­dus­try. Our task is sim­ply to di­ver­si­fy. But while niche in­dus­tries/sec­tors have a role to play, the "holy grail" is to de­vel­op an in­dus­try/sec­tor that will gen­er­ate bil­lions of US dol­lars–not just mil­lions of TT dol­lars.

That is, if we want to main­tain or in­crease our na­tion­al wealth.

The con­fer­ence left most con­vinced that the "holy grail" is to be found in our arts, par­tic­u­lar­ly the car­ni­val arts. Some con­trib­u­tors ref­er­enced work done by Kei­th Nurse and Jo-anne Tull, who were un­for­tu­nate­ly ab­sent. I say un­for­tu­nate­ly be­cause they are per­haps two of the strongest ad­vo­cates for the abil­i­ty of fes­ti­vals (of which car­ni­val is ar­guably the most pop­u­lar) to dri­ve eco­nom­ic growth and in­crease em­ploy­ment. Their re­search has tak­en them across the re­gion and be­yond; and the sta­tis­tics that come from their re­search are en­cour­ag­ing. A pop­u­lar ex­am­ple is that of St Lu­cia Jazz. St Lu­cia had a prob­lem–the month of May saw low tourist ar­rivals and they want­ed to do some­thing about it.

This Jazz Fes­ti­val turned May from a month with the low­est ho­tel oc­cu­pan­cy lev­els to a month with one of the high­est. I found a pre­sen­ta­tion from Dr Nurse avail­able on the web, where in 1998 the St Lu­cia gov­ern­ment is said to have spent (or should I say, in­vest­ed) US$1.55 mil­lion and in turn, en­joyed a vis­i­tor spend of US$14.15 mil­lion. That was way back then–I would as­sume that the re­turn has in­creased be­yond the US$14.15 mil­lion ex­pe­ri­enced in 1998. The St Lu­cia Tourist Board es­ti­mates that the me­dia val­ue alone of their Jazz Fes­ti­val, ex­ceeds their in­vest­ment. In 1998, St Lu­cia Jazz had just un­der 10, 000 vis­i­tor ar­rivals while Trinidad car­ni­val had 32, 000. Yet the to­tal spend of both was about US$14 mil­lion.

But as it is present­ly struc­tured, Trinidad car­ni­val is per­haps more about us as lo­cals and di­as­po­ra (known as VFR in the in­dus­try) as op­posed to gen­er­al over­seas vis­i­tors (as ap­pears to be the case with St Lu­cia Jazz). Yet de­spite this fo­cus, Dr Nurse's re­search pub­lished in the press in Feb­ru­ary this year, re­port­ed that mas play­ers spend about $93.4 mil­lion, and fetes earn over $500 mil­lion as part of a to­tal car­ni­val eco­nom­ic con­tri­bu­tion of $1.3 bil­lion. So we see the po­ten­tial right there. A di­a­mond in the rough that is al­ready val­ued in the TT bil­lions. Maybe if we cut and pol­ish it a bit, it would eas­i­ly be val­ued in the US bil­lions. As Josanne Leonard re­mind­ed us at the con­fer­ence–let us join the dots. This is be­yond tourism. Rather an en­tire so­cio-eco­nom­ic de­vel­op­men­tal pol­i­cy could be wrapped around our fes­ti­vals (I am see­ing at least one ma­jor fes­ti­val each month) which in­cludes Eid, Di­vali, Bor­ough Day, We Beat, To­ba­go Her­itage etc.

What about sports? I am al­so a big ad­vo­cate of sports tourism and would ar­gue that large events like the Fi­fa Un­der 17 Women's World Cup are sim­i­lar to fes­ti­vals. My name is Der­ren Joseph and I love my coun­try. As al­ways, I end by say­ing that de­spite our chal­lenges, we are so blessed to live in this beau­ti­ful land. Let us con­tin­ue to have the au­dac­i­ty of hope in our coun­try, as we em­bark up­on the next chap­ter in our na­tion's his­to­ry.