An­drea Perez-Sobers

Se­nior Re­porter

an­drea.perez-sobers

@guardian.co.tt

Busi­ness­es, large and small, say they are be­ing forced to adapt quick­ly to re­main com­pet­i­tive as they nav­i­gate sup­ply dis­rup­tions, ris­ing costs and fluc­tu­at­ing raw ma­te­r­i­al prices.

Speak­ing on the sec­ond day of the Trade and In­vest­ment Con­ven­tion (TIC) yes­ter­day at the Cen­tre of Ex­cel­lence, Ma­coya, Marisa Charles, spokesper­son for the Bliss clean­ing prod­uct line from Alche­my Prod­ucts Lim­it­ed, said the com­pa­ny has had to make ad­just­ments to keep prod­ucts on shelves.

“Sup­ply is­sues are some­thing that we are cur­rent­ly fac­ing right now. Some of our prod­ucts, we’ve had to change fra­grances and scents just to make sure that we still get it to the con­sumer. But this is busi­ness. If you look at the chal­lenges, you don’t see the op­por­tu­ni­ties. So we were able to use this as an op­por­tu­ni­ty to ex­pand,” Charles said.
Charles not­ed that the three-and-a-half-year-old com­pa­ny has built a strong pres­ence in re­gion­al ex­port mar­kets and is now work­ing to strength­en its foot­print across Trinidad and To­ba­go.

Re­gion­al brand man­ag­er at Farm & Func­tion, Nari­ba Robin­son, said volatil­i­ty in agri­cul­tur­al prices has made it in­creas­ing­ly dif­fi­cult to main­tain con­sis­tent pro­duc­tion costs.
“Some of the chal­lenges that we en­counter is a lot of our prod­ucts come from lo­cal farm­ers. We sup­port our lo­cal farm­ers 100 per cent, but one of the chal­lenges is that with price fluc­tu­a­tion, we might go and buy a pound of sweet pota­to to­day for $5 and go back next week and it might be $10,” Robin­son ex­plained.

She said the price in­creas­es stem from high­er pro­duc­tion costs be­ing faced by farm­ers.

“That’s be­cause the farm­ers them­selves are ex­pe­ri­enc­ing high costs for pro­duc­tion, so we’re try­ing to work with them as much as pos­si­ble to get stan­dard­ised pric­ing. But it’s on­ly so much the farm­ers could meet us halfway,” Robin­son added.

Mean­while, To­ba­go record­ed one of its largest del­e­ga­tions at this year’s con­ven­tion, with 16 par­tic­i­pants re­ceiv­ing sup­port from the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA).

THA Sec­re­tary of Fi­nance, Trade and the Econ­o­my Petal-Ann Roberts said the is­land is us­ing the con­ven­tion to show­case its busi­ness po­ten­tial and cre­ate ex­port op­por­tu­ni­ties.
“First­ly, To­ba­go is open for busi­ness. We have ap­prox­i­mate­ly 16 par­tic­i­pants this year,” Roberts said.

She not­ed that while on­ly a lim­it­ed num­ber of en­tre­pre­neurs could be spon­sored, sev­er­al oth­ers chose to at­tend in­de­pen­dent­ly.
“We have so many more en­tre­pre­neurs in To­ba­go, but we can on­ly have so much space here. We al­so have en­tre­pre­neurs who the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly have not spon­sored. They used to be spon­sored in the past, and they are now here on their own. We are just here to show­case what we have to of­fer and to lever­age the op­por­tu­ni­ties for ex­port, for scal­ing up and for growth,” Roberts said.

Roberts said there has been sig­nif­i­cant in­ter­est in To­ba­go’s agro-pro­cess­ing sec­tor and ex­pressed hope that more sup­port would be pro­vid­ed to help en­tre­pre­neurs ex­pand their busi­ness­es.