ONE TT believes that Trinidad & Tobago’s potential to be a prosperous and self-sufficient country needs to be differently explored and realized to benefit future generations, to provide a higher standard of living and a better quality of life for the average citizen.
We are concerned that:
- The international value of our extracted resources, which previously drove economic growth, is uncertain in an energy transition, and our high dependency on this resource base makes us vulnerable.
- As an initial move toward self-sufficiency, we have struggled to build a world-class local agricultural and agro-processing industry with decades of food import dependency despite our available resources
- Our foreign exchange generation is low and our import bill high, leading to higher debt and a lower standard of living for our citizens. We need to recognize and seize opportunities to re-activate or modernize other resources for income generation and to create a diversified economy at scale, with professional employment opportunities for our young people
- Our service sector has not fully matured and our standard of delivery for services needs to be benchmarked against countries that achieve world-class standards while promoting productivity
Some of these issues have been identified by previous studies and successive Governments, but mitigating proposals require effective and measured execution. At times this has fallen short or gone missing; a consequence of the nature and maturity of the political landscape.