PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

In the view of com­men­ta­tors, the most sur­pris­ing thing about the bud­get was the lack of sur­pris­es.

Ac­cord­ing to for­mer Fi­nance Min­is­ter Karen Nunez-Tesheira, much of the over five-hour pre­sen­ta­tion by Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Colm Im­bert was mere­ly a re­hash­ing of old poli­cies and plans which had been an­nounced over the course of the gov­ern­ment’s tenure.

“I mean a lot of rep­e­ti­tion, and they need less rep­e­ti­tion. I think most peo­ple would agree with that,” said Nunez-Tesheira, in an in­ter­view with Busi­ness Guardian mo­ments af­ter Min­is­ter Im­bert con­clud­ed the pre­sen­ta­tion.

How­ev­er, she said the gov­ern­ment’s an­nounce­ment about the Petrotrin re­fin­ery be­ing placed for sale or lease was an in­di­ca­tion that the re­fin­ery should not have been closed in the first place.

“I think that’s al­ways been very con­tro­ver­sial. You know, the re­fin­ery is­sue. Why close it down? I think what they need­ed to do was have it re­struc­tured. So to close it down to re­open it, and now it’s go­ing to cost much more to re­open the re­fin­ery,” said Nunez-Tesheir,a who stat­ed that while the re­fin­ery had been around for some time, it had been reg­u­lar­ly up­dat­ed for mod­ern de­mands, mak­ing the de­ci­sion to move away from the re­fin­ery, in her view, more baf­fling.

The Petrotrin re­fin­ery was closed in Oc­to­ber 2018, as the Gov­ern­ment said keep­ing the re­fin­ery open was cost­ing the coun­try bil­lions of dol­lars.

“Many parts of the plants are fair­ly new and be­ing and had been re­ha­bil­i­tat­ed. But to come now to now, to re­open re­fin­ery, af­ter say­ing that the re­fin­ery was a drain on the econ­o­my and drain on the rev­enue, it seemed such a con­tra­dic­tion, rather than re­struc­ture, which is what was rec­om­mend­ed, re­struc­ture it, make it a lean­er, clean­er en­ti­ty. But I don’t think clos­ing it down was the way to go,” said Nunez-Tesheira.

Dur­ing the bud­get pre­sen­ta­tion, the Fi­nance Min­is­ter re­port­ed that three bid­ders, CRO Con­sor­tium, a lo­cal­ly based con­sor­tium com­pris­ing three com­pa­nies, DR Com­modi­ties Lim­it­ed, Chemie-Tech and Ocala; IN­CA En­er­gy LLC, a com­pa­ny based in the USA; and Oan­do PLC, a com­pa­ny based in Nige­ria had been short­list­ed to take own­er­ship of the re­fin­ery.

“That re­open­ing of the re­fin­ery, let’s see what hap­pens. There are three bid­ders, he says, let’s see what hap­pens with that,” said the for­mer Fi­nance Min­is­ter.

How­ev­er Pres­i­dent. Greater San Fer­nan­do Area Cham­ber of Com­merce (GS­FCC) Ki­ran Singh was far more op­ti­mistic con­cern­ing the pos­si­ble re­open­ing of the re­fin­ery, giv­en the po­ten­tial im­pact it could have in South West­ern Trinidad.

“The re­fin­ery will be ei­ther sold or leased in the very near fu­ture. That is wel­come news for the south west­ern penisu­la, not on­ly San Fer­nan­do,” said Singh dur­ing CNC3’s post-bud­get re­view show on Mon­day evening, “and of course it will bring some in­vest­ment in­to the down­stream in­dus­tries from the re­open­ing of the re­fin­ery. Be­cause a lot of ma­chin­ery has gone idle and with that, we can see some rein­vest­ment in the south­ern econ­o­my.”

Nunez-Tesheira and oth­er com­men­ta­tors how­ev­er were a bit dis­ap­point­ed that more was not said about mea­sures to bring in rev­enue apart from the en­er­gy sec­tor.

Tax-free agri­cul­ture

Econ­o­mist Dr. Vaalmik­ki Ar­joon said while there was an an­nounce­ment that agri­cul­ture would be made tax-free, he was not sure the ob­sta­cles in place of agri­cul­tur­al de­vel­op­ment had been re­moved, based on the in­for­ma­tion in the pre­sen­ta­tion.

“We keep hear­ing agri­cul­ture is a tax-free sec­tor, but it re­al­ly is not. We need to dis­pel that one time, or if not, they need to put mea­sures in place to en­sure that agri­cul­ture does be­come tax-free. Farm­ers still have to pay cor­po­ra­tion tax. They still have to pay tax­es when they im­port items. Even when im­port­ing seeds, you pay tax on that, im­port­ing equip­ment and ma­chin­ery, etc. You pay tax on that,” said Ar­joon, “In fair­ness to them. They are a litany of in­cen­tives and cer­tain tax cred­its and breaks that farm­ers can ac­tu­al­ly take ad­van­tage of by the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture. The prob­lem with that, though, is that there are thou­sands of farm­ers who can’t ac­cess it.”

He ex­plained this is a re­sult of the fact that many up-and-com­ing farm­ers do not have land tenure.

“This is a prob­lem that keeps rolling over year af­ter year, and I think it’s high time that we find a so­lu­tion to en­sure that farm­ers, those who don’t have land tenure, they can quick­ly get land tenure so that they can ac­cess not just the in­cen­tives of­fered by the Min­istry of Agri­cul­ture, but al­so loans from the Agri­cul­tur­al De­vel­op­ment Bank. If you don’t have tenure, it’s al­most as though you’re an un­reg­is­tered com­pa­ny, so you can’t go to a bank and get a loan. It is the same con­cept for farm­ers with­out land tenure,” said Ar­joon, who al­so called for greater us­age of smart tech­nol­o­gy for the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor to help max­imise re­turns from land and crops, par­tic­u­lar­ly giv­en the chal­lenges pre­sent­ed by cli­mate change.

“The Min­is­ter spoke a lot about cli­mate change and its im­pact on the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor, but there’s, in my view, there have been no re­al mea­sures put in place to mit­i­gate the ef­fects of cli­mate change on the agri­cul­tur­al sec­tor,’ said Ar­joon, who felt the gov­ern­ment could learn from Chi­na with re­gard to us­ing such tech­nol­o­gy for crop de­vel­op­ment.

“This is where smart tech­nol­o­gy use and the agri­cul­ture comes in. Sim­ple things like get­ting new tech­nol­o­gy, such as sen­sors for your acreage, util­is­ing sen­sors and big da­ta to tell the farmer on his de­vice, be it an iPad or his iPhone, whether they get whether there’s enough ir­ri­ga­tion or there is not enough wa­ter, enough nu­tri­ents, which area in their acreage is in­fest­ed with pests, how much fer­tilis­er, how much fer­tilis­ers a par­tic­u­lar area needs ver­sus an­oth­er area. All of these things can help to op­ti­mise your out­put per acreage un­der the very sim­ple so­lu­tions and the tech­nol­o­gy is there,” said Dr. Ar­joon.

How­ev­er, the econ­o­mist did hail the Min­is­ter for ex­plain­ing the de­ci­sion to switch the pric­ing mech­a­nism for LNG prices from Hen­ry Hub to oth­er in­ter­na­tion­al stan­dards, which has gar­nered the coun­try an ad­di­tion­al US $1b in rev­enue.