Eliz­a­beth Gon­za­les

To­ba­go Cor­re­spon­dent

Chief Sec­re­tary Far­ley Au­gus­tine says the $32 mil­lion in sup­ple­men­tal fund­ing and the $102 De­vel­op­ment Bank of Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean (CAF) loan be­ing or­gan­ised for the To­ba­go House of As­sem­bly (THA) is not enough. He said this is be­cause To­ba­go’s de­vel­op­ment needs far out­weigh the $134 mil­lion in com­bined fund­ing.

Speak­ing dur­ing the 2025–2026 THA Bud­get de­bate yes­ter­day, Au­gus­tine said the fund­ing was in­suf­fi­cient for re­al growth on the is­land.

“If you ask any­body on this side whether we think the 32 mil­lion plus the $100 mil­lion (ac­tu­al­ly $102 mil­lion) from CAF is suf­fi­cient, we will tell you no,” Au­gus­tine told the cham­ber.

Au­gus­tine was re­fer­ring to the ad­di­tion­al fund­ing for To­ba­go which Min­is­ter of Fi­nance Dave Tan­coo an­nounced in the Mid-year Bud­get Re­view last week. Tan­coo al­so an­nounced that an ad­di­tion­al $621 mil­lion will al­so come from an al­lo­ca­tion aris­ing out of man­date for all min­istries and state agen­cies spend­ing mon­ey on To­ba­go projects to li­aise di­rect­ly with Chief Sec­re­tary Au­gus­tine, the two To­ba­go MPs and the THA to fi­nalise ex­pen­di­tures for 2025.

Yes­ter­day, Au­gus­tine ar­gued that To­ba­go can­not com­pete re­gion­al­ly—par­tic­u­lar­ly in tourism—with­out sig­nif­i­cant­ly greater fi­nan­cial sup­port from Cen­tral Gov­ern­ment.

“To­ba­go de­vel­op­ment needs are so great that we have to be fund­ed at a rate above every dis­trict in Trinidad. In or­der for us to catch up, we want mir­a­cles in tourism,” he said.

He com­pared To­ba­go’s mar­ket­ing bud­get to that of Bar­ba­dos, say­ing the is­land’s clos­est com­peti­tor spends over US$40 mil­lion an­nu­al­ly on tourism ad­ver­tis­ing, in­clud­ing in­ter­na­tion­al place­ments.

“You’re not even spend­ing US$10 mil­lion on mar­ket­ing. In fact, we not even get­ting that. We’re not even get­ting US$10 mil­lion to run the whole TTAL (To­ba­go Tourism Agency Ltd,” he said, adding that To­ba­go is ex­pect­ed to do far more with far less.