GEISHA KOW­LESSAR-ALON­ZO

geisha.kow­lessar@guardian.co.tt

The food and bev­er­age sec­tor may be slow­ly re­open­ing but its eco­nom­ic fu­ture looks grim even af­ter Gov­ern­ment’s re­stric­tions are even­tu­al­ly lift­ed post the COVID-19 pan­dem­ic.

And more­so the fu­ture is al­so grim for the thou­sands of em­ploy­ees who work in the sec­tor.

At a press con­fer­ence yes­ter­day, Pres­i­dent of the T&T Bev­er­age Al­co­hol Al­liance Dr Patrick An­tione de­scribed the loss­es as stag­ger­ing.

“We don’t see the sec­tor re­cov­er­ing, mak­ing up that stag­ger at all even though the sec­tor comes out of lock­down at this stage,” An­tione said.

He added that due to the pan­dem­ic con­sumer con­fi­dence has al­so been com­pro­mised.

Added to this is grow­ing un­em­ploy­ment lead­ing to fur­ther fi­nan­cial fall­out.

“So the spend in dis­pos­al in­come is al­so down so what we are faced with, as it were, is the per­fect storm,” An­tione said.

Bri­an Fron­tin, CEO of the Trinidad Ho­tels, Restau­rants and Tourism As­so­ci­a­tion who al­so spoke said that in­dus­try was one of the hard­est hit.

And it too is ex­pect­ed to make a slow re­cov­ery.

“The March to June pe­ri­od with ze­ro rev­enue is not a busi­ness mod­el that a restau­rant or even a bar can with­stand be­cause their busi­ness is based on week­ly cash flow,” Fron­tin ex­plained.

He said for 90 days most es­tab­lish­ments bled through their sav­ings to cov­er over­head costs like util­i­ties.

Fur­ther, busi­ness­es al­so have to shell out large sums to in­vest in per­son­al pro­tec­tive equip­ment.

Fron­tin said de­spite the bleak out­look busi­ness­es may be able to sur­vive if they in­no­vate.

He ad­vised that it is crit­i­cal­ly im­por­tant that a sig­nif­i­cant lev­el of health and safe­ty pro­to­col es­tab­lish­ment and busi­ness pre­pared­ness ex­er­cis­es be con­duct­ed over the next few weeks by restau­rants, bars and food es­tab­lish­ments to achieve the fol­low­ing over­ar­ch­ing core ob­jec­tives:

• Min­imise the risk of sec­ondary or ter­tiary in­fec­tion waves of COVID-19 across the pop­u­la­tion and build op­er­a­tor re­silience to ad­dress fu­ture out­breaks

• Re­store a de­gree of con­fi­dence in the wider pop­u­la­tion, that pa­tron­age of these es­tab­lish­ments

can be done safe­ly

• En­sure a de­gree of eco­nom­ic stim­u­la­tion and em­ploy­ment lev­els

• Pro­mote a cul­ture of health, safe­ty, and hy­gien­ic prac­tices across this sec­tor that would raise and main­tain op­er­at­ing stan­dards and at the same time, re­duce risks of food borne dis­eases in T&T