34 February 2016 - Business View Caribbean
happened before, so the big emphasis is on efficiency.
You have to make sure operations are as efficient as
possible to reduce your costs, and so you can continue
to produce even in these low-price environments. The
big threat is on future investments and whether we’ll
see the investments we need in order to maintain our
production levels. Production of gas in Trinidad has
been falling over the last two years and that puts a
strain on our LNG facilities and on our petrochemical
companies because they’re not getting all the gas they
need to produce at capacity. So that affects them. The
only solution to that is investment in new gas produc-
tion, but obviously, in this environment, it’s even more
challenging than it was before.”
Isn’t part of the answer in Trinidad and Tobago, specifi-
cally, to increase the diversity of its economic sectors?
Of course, that is the long-term objective for the coun-
try - to diversity our economy away from reliance on
the carbon sector. But the reality of that diversifica-
tion will take many years; it’s not going to happen over
the next two or three. We can work on it now, but it’s
not something that’s going to give us an immediate
solution to the problem that we’re in. I think what we
need to be doing as an industry and as a country is to
reduce the level of subsidies which are going from the
state to individuals and to business and we need to be
much more efficient in how we’re using the revenue
that we have. We’ve become quite wasteful because
we have money coming in, so the economy becomes
quite wasteful in its use of resources. We’re very en-
ergy inefficient; we waste a lot of electricity, we waste
a lot of transport fuels and if we can change that struc-
ture and be less wasteful, the economy could survive
on a lower level of government expenditure.”
That’s not something that the Chamber can do on its
own, right?
Of course. Our role is to advocate that with the gov-
ernment and to put forward a position and to try to
convince a change in the policy environment to make
that happen.”
