The mu­sic, artistry and cul­tur­al ex­pres­sions that go in­to T&T Car­ni­val, un­like the oil and gas on which the econ­o­my still de­pends, are not dwin­dling re­sources.

Prop­er­ly man­aged and mar­ket­ed, these com­po­nents of this coun­try’s biggest fes­ti­val can gen­er­ate much-need­ed for­eign ex­change through vis­i­tor ex­pen­di­ture and the var­i­ous ac­tiv­i­ties in this cre­ative sec­tor.

That is why it is so per­plex­ing that an in­dus­try that has de­vel­oped over more than two cen­turies on a steady sup­ply of in­no­va­tion and lo­cal­ly sourced con­tent, has been tap­ping in­to the coun­try’s scarce sup­ply of for­eign ex­change.

Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley’s con­cerns about for­eign ex­change be­ing ex­pend­ed to im­port Car­ni­val cos­tumes are valid.

This is not how the Car­ni­val in­dus­try should op­er­ate. It is time for a clos­er ex­am­i­na­tion of the fac­tors that have led to this shift from mas pro­duc­tion to mas im­por­ta­tion.

Sev­er­al band­lead­ers have claimed it is too ex­pen­sive to make cos­tumes with lo­cal­ly sourced raw ma­te­ri­als, but it might be time for a deep­er ex­am­i­na­tion of the eco­nom­ic mod­els used by mas bands.

The trend of im­port­ing fin­ished Brazil­ian-styled cos­tumes from Chi­na — which band­lead­ers say can be 50 to 100 per cent cheap­er than mak­ing a cos­tume from scratch with lo­cal raw ma­te­ri­als — has sparked many con­tentious de­bates about the lack of cre­ativ­i­ty and orig­i­nal­i­ty in the pro­duc­tion of a mas band.

Bring­ing in con­tain­ers of com­plet­ed cos­tumes with all the se­quins, beads and feath­ers pre­ferred by mas­quer­aders might be more cost-ef­fec­tive for mas band­lead­ers but does not make much eco­nom­ic sense on a na­tion­al scale.

This is oc­cur­ring even as Car­ni­val’s po­ten­tial to be­come a key pil­lar of this coun­try’s eco­nom­ic ad­vance­ment is yet to be ful­ly re­alised.

The in­come gen­er­at­ed from the fes­ti­val last year, when ap­prox­i­mate­ly 41,444 vis­i­tors came to T&T and spent US$94.2 mil­lion on food, en­ter­tain­ment, ac­com­mo­da­tion, trans­port, and oth­er ex­pens­es, might just be a drop in the buck­et com­pared to what the fes­ti­val can con­tribute to the econ­o­my.

How­ev­er, ac­cord­ing to ex­perts such as Dr Kei­th Nurse, who has done re­search on the sub­ject, there is a dearth of com­pre­hen­sive da­ta on the an­nu­al fes­ti­val.

In the ab­sence of con­crete da­ta, there is no way to val­i­date or dis­prove the mas band­lead­ers’ claims about the high cost of lo­cal­ly sourced ma­te­ri­als for cos­tumes. There is al­so no way to mea­sure the in­come pro­duced from the wide ar­ray of goods and ser­vices pro­vid­ed through­out the fes­ti­val and to get a true pic­ture of Car­ni­val’s con­tri­bu­tion to GDP.

In a re­cent in­ter­view with the Busi­ness Guardian, Dr Jo-anne Tull, a lec­tur­er in Car­ni­val Stud­ies at UWI, St Au­gus­tine, said it was im­por­tant to delve fur­ther in­to how T&T’s Car­ni­val can be ex­port­ed and al­so be used to gen­er­ate oth­er sources of for­eign ex­change.

That po­ten­tial ex­tends well be­yond the sea­son and the bor­ders of T&T and, as Tull point­ed out, it is time to get se­ri­ous about har­ness­ing av­enues and op­por­tu­ni­ties for growth in the in­dus­try that would lead to ex­port.

How­ev­er, that po­ten­tial will not be re­alised if mas pro­duc­ers go for the cheap­er, pack­aged, made-in-Chi­na op­tion rather than the cre­ativ­i­ty and in­no­va­tion, with full use of lo­cal con­tent, on which T&T Car­ni­val was built.

This needs to be a sub­ject of se­ri­ous dis­cus­sion at the Car­ni­val 2025 post-mortems.