MAMAGUYING THE SMALL MAN

Within months of getting into office, the Rowley Government gave a US $5 million taxpayer-funded loan to a paper-converting company, a unit of a multinational group. 

The aim, according to Finance Minister Colm Imbert, was to save jobs. 

The company had been integrated seven years earlier into a prosperous conglomerate with plants and distribution centres in various cities in Central and South America. 

The government has not shown such empathy for small and medium-sized businesses, a backbone of the economy with 85 percent of registered enterprises, 200,000 workers, and 28 percent of GDP. 

The Covid-19 lockdown crashed 6,000 of the 17,000 small businesses, unable to pay bank charges and service rent, utility, payroll, and other operating costs. 

Each bank, meanwhile, raked in historic billion-dollar profits, making Trinidad and Tobago the only economy in which financial institutions improved their bottom lines during the pandemic. 

Local conglomerates also recorded enhanced revenues, with some entering the retail, distribution and light manufacturing fields of small businesses that went belly up. 

One business group – whose products contribute to deadly non-communicable diseases – says it is “optimistic” about continued growth, even as purposeful community operations are reduced to the scrap heap. 

Talking about scrap, the shutdown of metal recycling exports – markets secured by hardworking dealers – is heartless and foolish.   

While competitive nations strive for exports in the tough global marketplace, the T&T authorities have closed down an industry with a $260 million annual trade. 

Only recently, Trade and Industry Minister Paula Gopee-Scoon touted the sector for economic diversification and committed the government to collaborate “to ensure the growth and development of the sector”. 

Scrap iron recycling is a blossoming international industry, worth US $50 billion in the United States alone. 

In T&T, the industry is not regulated, and there are medical and environmental risks as ambitious working-class operators toil in difficult circumstances to earn a living. 

The ban stems from the plague of thefts – a clinical law-and-order issue. 

The appropriate response is to dramatically improve law enforcement and to regulate the industry. 

Dealers have long proposed a system of registration, in which they account for their cargo, disclose business addresses, and are subject to official searches and police arrests. 

That structure would expose criminals. 

Instead, the government chose to senselessly punish the entire industry and abandon hard-fought markets that earn precious foreign exchange. 

Like small businesses, scrap iron dealers are victims of poor policy-making by an administration lacking business acumen and with little sensitivity to village investors and the welfare of the common man. 

These atrocious measures add to a jobless line that is matched in recent history only by the economic collapse of the 1980s. 

They are also widening the gap between rich and poor, destroying the middle class and reducing wage-earners to poverty. 

Look also at the current food production hoopla from an administration that allocated a paltry $1 billion to agriculture in the 2022 national budget of $54.4 billion. 

Like an innocent nursery student, the government has joined the chant “Eat What You Grow,” while ignoring the distressing fact that most of our food — $6 billion a year! – comes from foreign fields. 

Because of a lack of official support, domestic food production contributes less than one percent of GDP. 

Prime Minister Rowley has adopted the lingo of Caricom spin twin Mia Mottley and Dr. Irfaan Ali in advocating at least a 25 percent reduction in food imports in three years’ time. 

Ms. Mottley has again brought her native intelligence to a crisis and Dr. Ali is making available vast acreage, labour, hydro-electric capacity, and is introducing modern technology.  

The Barbadian and Guyanese bosses are leaders the region deserves amid severe food shortages and 40-year high inflation. 

For their part, the T&T authorities were unmoved as the wolf inched toward the door, declining to introduce new technology and hydroponics, compensate flood-hit farmers, improve access roads, provide market support, deal with praedial larceny, etc. 

On the day Rowley talked about regional food security with Ali, Couva farmers protested the obstruction of watercourses, causing floods and destruction of produce. 

The Prime Minister’s position on food production is gleaned in his shambolic 2020 plan to import white yam from Ghana – more than 4,000 miles away! – while nearby Jamaica has 20 percent of the world’s market in that ground provision. 

A year and a half earlier, he said: “We have no land space to talk about to getting involved in agriculture…” 

In light of the chronic neglect of domestic farming, who could be confident that T&T would meet its lofty promise of growing food and slashing its exports? 

Who has faith that the authorities would actively advance the common man’s economic interests? 

It’s mamaguy season, and the small man remains the fall guy.