PE­TER CHRISTO­PHER

pe­ter.christo­pher@guardian.co.tt

A sit­u­a­tion be­yond that imag­ined in a night­mare.

This was the re­ac­tion of Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley af­ter he learnt of the dra­mat­ic drop in US oil prices while at the first meet­ing of Trinidad and To­ba­go’s Road Map to Re­cov­ery team yes­ter­day.

“I al­so want to tell you, there’s been no time like this and even in a bad dream we couldn’t an­tic­i­pate this. ... I knew when I came in here the price of oil was $5 a bar­rel WTI. It has just gone to one dol­lar. Ladies and gen­tle­men, one dol­lar a bar­rel per oil did not ex­ist in my adult life,” Row­ley said dur­ing his ad­dress at the meet­ing.

The Prime Min­is­ter point­ed out that ac­cord­ing to the World Bank’s Se­mi-An­nu­al Re­port on the Latin Amer­i­ca and Caribbean Re­gion, Trinidad and To­ba­go was more pre­pared for the cri­sis than most of its Caribbean coun­ter­parts. He, how­ev­er, stressed that prop­er plan­ning for life af­ter COVID-19 need­ed to be thor­ough­ly con­sid­ered.

“Trinidad and To­ba­go must now plan for its post peak COVID-19 fu­ture with­in the con­fines of the ‘new nor­mal,’ at least un­til such time that a vac­cine is de­vel­oped and test­ed, which could take be­tween 12-18 months,” Row­ley said.

“An im­por­tant first step in de­vel­op­ing the Re­cov­ery Road Map must be to clear­ly iden­ti­fy and analyse the con­straints that will con­tin­ue to ex­ist for some time.”

He said a po­ten­tial so­cial and eco­nom­ic re­boot would have to be done fol­low­ing a readi­ness as­sess­ment over­seen by the Chief Med­ical Of­fi­cer and health ex­perts, which could state which non-es­sen­tial busi­ness­es and in­sti­tu­tions re-open first.

“There is a con­tin­u­ing need to pri­ori­tise cur­rent­ly lim­it­ed re­sources to pro­tect eco­nom­i­cal­ly vul­ner­a­ble groups and sup­port those sec­tors re­lat­ed to peo­ple’s liveli­hoods. Fur­ther­more, there must be suf­fi­cient food and dai­ly ne­ces­si­ties avail­able for the pop­u­la­tion. Al­le­vi­at­ing the neg­a­tive im­pact on liveli­hoods and the econ­o­my must be giv­en as much at­ten­tion as stop­ping the virus so as to pre­vent se­vere dam­age to eco­nom­ic and so­cial sys­tems over the medi­um term,” he said.

“At the same time, the pop­u­lace must be en­cour­aged to think what they must do dif­fer­ent­ly once the ‘Stay at Home’ or­der is re­laxed giv­en that health and be­hav­iour­al pro­to­cols will most like­ly be a con­tin­ued re­quire­ment to pre­vent fur­ther trans­mis­sion.”

The Prime Min­is­ter ad­mit­ted that medi­um to long term goals would in­clude in­creas­ing Gov­ern­ment ef­fi­cien­cy by re­duc­ing bu­reau­cra­cy, while gov­ern­ment spend­ing in re­la­tion to re­turns would al­so be re­quired as the pan­dem­ic ex­posed many frail­ties in our econ­o­my.

“In view of the lessons learnt from COVID-19, the de­fi­cien­cies and struc­tur­al rigidi­ties in the econ­o­my must be ex­am­ined as the ba­sis for re­mod­el­ling and cre­at­ing a new econ­o­my,” he said.

“As a small is­land econ­o­my fac­ing ex­ter­nal vul­ner­a­bil­i­ties, can we con­tin­ue hav­ing such high de­pen­dence on food im­ports?”

Adding that the coun­try should al­so be wary of adopt­ing the form of a per­ma­nent wel­fare state, which could set back the econ­o­my fur­ther, he said, “COVID-19 has un­masked the in­equal­i­ties that ex­ist in the econ­o­my and at the wider so­ci­etal lev­el. But, it has al­so demon­strat­ed that all seg­ments of the so­ci­ety are at risk.”