The ap­point­ment of well-known and high­ly suc­cess­ful man­u­fac­tur­er/ex­porter Satyaka­ma “Ka­ma” Ma­haraj, as Min­is­ter of Trade, In­vest­ment and Tourism, has al­ready been well-re­ceived by the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers’ As­so­ci­a­tion and oth­er busi­ness in­ter­ests. His ap­point­ment to the Cab­i­net is one of the bet­ter ex­ec­u­tive man­age­r­i­al de­ci­sions tak­en up to this point by Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar in shap­ing her new Gov­ern­ment.

Lit­tle needs to be added about Ma­haraj’s 30-year-plus ven­ture in­to man­u­fac­tur­ing and the spread of his cos­met­ic prod­ucts through the US and oth­er parts of the Amer­i­c­as, in­clud­ing Cu­ba; quite a range of dif­fer­ing mar­kets. His ven­ture in­to the rough, tough and very com­pet­i­tive over­seas trade in cos­met­ic prod­ucts is one of the suc­cess sto­ries of the man­u­fac­tur­ing and ex­port sec­tor in T&T.

It has been re­peat­ed on many oc­ca­sions by econ­o­mists, ex­porters and gov­ern­ment spokesper­sons that de­vel­op­ing the lo­cal non-en­er­gy man­u­fac­tur­ing in­dus­try for ex­port is vi­tal if this coun­try is to re­duce its present al­most com­plete de­pen­dence on the pe­tro­le­um and petro­chem­i­cal in­dus­try to earn for­eign ex­change.

But it’s not just a mat­ter for T&T to ex­pand the man­u­fac­tur­ing space, but a chal­lenge to broad­en the con­cep­tu­al mind­set in which el­e­ments of the busi­ness sec­tor have op­er­at­ed through­out the post-colo­nial pe­ri­od. What the new Min­is­ter of Trade can do for the lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ing sec­tor is to have those mem­bers of the in­dus­try con­ceive of op­er­at­ing in a new space, ie, the world mar­ket out­side of Cari­com.

Al­ready, Min­is­ter Ma­haraj has iden­ti­fied the 470 mil­lion peo­ple in the West Africa mar­ket as a po­ten­tial con­ti­nen­tal source of trade. West Africa can al­so be a jump­ing-off point to the oth­er coun­tries in that re­gion, all of them be­ing po­ten­tial cus­tomers for T&T-man­u­fac­tured prod­ucts and ser­vices.

To grasp the pos­si­bil­i­ties con­tained there­in will most cer­tain­ly be a means of ex­pand­ing out of the lo­cal and Cari­com mar­kets of sev­en to eight mil­lion con­sumers. More­over, in adopt­ing a path to ex­pand the hori­zons of trade, lo­cal man­u­fac­tur­ers will ef­fec­tive­ly move out of the colo­nial past in­to tru­ly a new world.

A ma­jor chal­lenge iden­ti­fied by Min­is­ter Ma­haraj is to dra­mat­i­cal­ly cut the trav­el time be­tween the Caribbean and Africa from the two-day time frame to one of eight hours. That in it­self will pro­vide pos­si­bil­i­ties for Caribbean Air­lines.

The usu­al con­tention of which el­e­ment of the trad­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties should pre­cede the oth­er will arise - whether pro­duc­tion and trad­ing should be­gin be­fore the air trans­porta­tion links are in place. That is as it should be, a co­or­di­na­tion be­tween the two as­pects of trade set­ting down the ba­sis for pro­duc­tion, ex­port and im­port. In this re­spect, a tourism in­dus­try be­tween the is­lands and the con­ti­nent may al­so present it­self to es­tab­lish the ground for the take-off in trade re­la­tions. The di­rect and in­volved work must start now with­out de­lay, with all of the po­ten­tial play­ers be­com­ing ac­tive.

Re­fresh­ing­ly, so far in his ini­tial state­ments, Min­is­ter Ma­haraj has avoid­ed go­ing down a po­lit­i­cal road with the kind of chat usu­al­ly as­so­ci­at­ed with politi­cians win­ning and los­ing of­fice and both feel­ing the need to get in­to po­lit­i­cal skir­mish­es play­ing to the gallery. This is a good sign be­cause the coun­try is not in a po­si­tion to tol­er­ate po­lit­i­cal games.