It is be­com­ing blunt­ly clear that if, as a coun­try, you can­not be rel­a­tive­ly self-suf­fi­cient in food, if you can’t keep the lights on and if you don’t have wa­ter in your taps, or wa­ter sup­port for agri­cul­ture and in­dus­try, then you have a se­ri­ous prob­lem.

It is al­so very clear that a coun­try must have some­thing to of­fer the world by way of prod­ucts or ser­vices, or some­thing to at­tract peo­ple to vis­it that coun­try, to earn from the world mar­ket. So, a coun­try has to pro­duce things oth­ers need to earn forex. Hav­ing tourists vis­it­ing your shores al­so brings forex.

When tourists come, they want things to do, places to go, ex­pe­ri­ences to savour, so that means de­vel­op­ing and mak­ing avail­able cul­tur­al as­sets, na­ture and nat­ur­al trea­sures, and hu­man, in­tel­lec­tu­al and cre­ative cap­i­tal as­sets in a way tourists can en­joy is vi­tal. If agri­cul­tur­al prod­ucts sup­port cre­ative cui­sine and the trans­porta­tion sys­tem is safe and con­ve­nient in a coun­try, then the tourism val­ue chain is fur­ther en­hanced. Tourism cre­ates a stake­hold­er cir­cle.

We have a labour par­tic­i­pa­tion rate of about 54 per cent in T&T. That means about 276,000 peo­ple who can work or pro­duce are not com­mer­cial­ly en­gaged. This al­so means they are weak in con­sump­tion be­cause they are low on in­come. When con­sumer de­mand is weak, busi­ness­es do not do well.

In or­der to cre­ate jobs, you must have in­vest­ment to cre­ate busi­ness­es which need work­ers. The State does not have the mon­ey for in­vest­ment cap­i­tal now. And most of the State en­ter­pris­es are loss-mak­ing op­er­a­tions at tax­pay­ers’ ex­pense.

When an en­tre­pre­neur, busi­ness­man or com­pa­ny makes an in­vest­ment, the in­ten­tion is to make a prof­it. If it can­not make a prof­it, the busi­ness clos­es shop or the own­er sells to some­one who thinks they can make a go of it. At the present time, food busi­ness­es of var­i­ous kinds are do­ing well. Peo­ple have to eat. The sec­ond kind of busi­ness do­ing well is med­i­cine and drugs, be­cause when peo­ple are sick or need med­i­cine to func­tion, they will make that a pri­or­i­ty. Oth­er busi­ness­es may not be do­ing as well. When prices are high and cash is lim­it­ed and un­cer­tain­ty reigns, peo­ple fo­cus on es­sen­tials.

We need in­vest­ment out­side en­er­gy while we wait for en­er­gy irons in the fire to man­i­fest. Every­one agrees. But how to get it? The con­fi­dence lev­el is not there be­cause the econ­o­my shows no buoy­an­cy. This has been so for most of a decade. We have to court in­vest­ment in agri­cul­ture but to do what? To re­duce the im­port bill? To in­crease self-suf­fi­cien­cy? To ex­port pro­duce or build agro-pro­cess­ing and man­u­fac­tur­ing? Any one or all of these can be achieved but one has to have a strat­e­gy and plan with tar­gets and in­volve pro­duc­ers.

If we are build­ing up tourism, how many plane loads from where do we need per month to meet our tar­gets and what is the in­fra­struc­ture we are prepar­ing to sup­port their leisure, their plea­sure and their spend? And if we want man­u­fac­tur­ers to dou­ble their ex­ports, what do we need to do to make that hap­pen with­in a cer­tain time frame? If we pur­sued all three tracks, agri­cul­ture, tourism, ex­port man­u­fac­tur­ing, each track will con­tribute to growth, in­vest­ment, jobs, in­comes and op­por­tu­ni­ties cre­ation, for a more buoy­ant econ­o­my and to de­vel­op­ment it­self. This would be build­ing on what we have. But col­lab­o­ra­tive re­la­tions with ac­tors are key. And or­gan­ised crime and cor­rup­tion have to be con­tained. The scram­ble for the Dan­ny Guer­ra em­pire shows how vis­i­ble and pro­tect­ed cor­rup­tion and gang­ster­ism are.

But we al­so need to build an econ­o­my linked to where we are head­ed tech­no­log­i­cal­ly in this AI-dri­ven and Quan­tum-ready­ing world. We have op­por­tu­ni­ties that we have re­cent­ly cre­at­ed through agree­ments with In­dia, but we must act ex­pe­di­tious­ly, we must roll out re­sults; be­cause we need to move with the tech­nol­o­gy, at­tract in­vest­ment that taps our in­tel­lec­tu­al cap­i­tal, moves our jobs high­er up the val­ue chain, quick­ens the pace of di­ver­si­fi­ca­tion and gives us a mean­ing­ful role in the glob­al val­ue sys­tem.

Our en­gage­ment with the US, In­dia, Cana­da, Latin Amer­i­ca and Cari­com must yield more eco­nom­ic val­ue.

What does it take to make 1.4 mil­lion peo­ple, im­mi­grants and all, hap­py? What does it take to make 500,000 house­holds sus­tain them­selves and 600 com­mu­ni­ties striv­ing and thriv­ing? We have to have a plan to make 250,000 pro­duc­tive and com­mer­cial­ly en­gaged. We have to sum­mon the where­with­al to re­cov­er and grow to achieve shared pros­per­i­ty. That is the im­me­di­ate task.