GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

CEO OF Am­cham T&T Ni­rad Tewarie says this coun­try's for­eign ex­change sit­u­a­tion is a hard prob­lem to solve as any move can have a ma­jor ad­verse ef­fect.

In an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia at the or­gan­i­sa­tion's 28th an­nu­al HSSE Con­fer­ence and Ex­hi­bi­tion launch which took place at the Hy­att Re­gency on Mon­day night, Tewarie said any ad­just­ment would like­ly have an ad­verse im­pact, where­as in­ac­tion al­so could mean the cur­rent short­ages could per­sist.

"I think it is clear (forex prob­lem) is get­ting even more acute. This is a re­al­ly big is­sue for busi­ness­es and or­di­nary peo­ple for quite a while. The so­lu­tions are com­plex and any­thing you do is go­ing to have a con­se­quence and any­thing that you don't do is go­ing to have a con­se­quence.

"Right now, what we are see­ing is a lot of the con­se­quences of try­ing to wait it out, but a knee-jerk re­ac­tion in the op­po­site di­rec­tion could have oth­er neg­a­tive con­se­quences such as in­fla­tion," Tewarie ex­plained.

He said in at­tempts to find so­lu­tions to the prob­lem this ought not to re­sult in "more Gov­ern­ment in­ser­tion" in­to the process as this would just make an "im­per­fect sit­u­a­tion more im­per­fect" as the ob­jec­tive is to get clos­er to a point of more mar­ket equi­lib­ri­um.

"We see some calls for the Gov­ern­ment to de­cide on spe­cif­ic al­lo­ca­tions. That is not what you want in any econ­o­my. You want to be free and for there to be a high lev­el of eco­nom­ic free­dom and to have an easy en­vi­ron­ment to do busi­ness," Tewarie ex­plained.

On his take whether Gov­ern­ment should de­val­ue or float the dol­lar, Tewarie said this is a though pol­i­cy ques­tion.

"What is clear is that we don't have a float any more. If the dol­lar was float­ed, we don't know where it will land. We don't know ex­act­ly how con­fi­dence will be built and there­fore, what the im­pact on in­fla­tion will be but at the same time we know that con­tin­u­ing to op­er­ate in the way that we are op­er­at­ing is caus­ing sig­nif­i­cant pain and strain and to some ex­tent putting some sti­fling pres­sures on the econ­o­my," Tewarie added.

Such pres­sures he said, are be­ing felt par­tic­u­lar­ly by small busi­ness­es and even or­di­nary cit­i­zens.

"If you think of a fam­i­ly of four try­ing to trav­el, it is go­ing to be very dif­fi­cult far less for a small busi­nessper­son," Tewarie stat­ed.