Business View Caribbean | October 2019

44 BUSINESS VIEW CARIBBEAN OCTOBER 2019 BVC: How are you positioning to achieve this quest? Prime Minister: “To do this, we have to address a number of cross-cutting issues. Thirty-nine percent of 12-year-olds were at secondary school when I arrived. I had to make sure that by 2005, every 12-year-old was at secondary school. And we had an overall education revolution which is evolving, advancing, consolidating; tremendous work has been done, right from early childhood to university. And with other areas that are not mainstream, like addressing students with special needs, and continuing studies for adults. That’s the first thing. “Secondly, we wanted to get into services – tourism clearly has to be one of the major services – but I couldn’t do that without a jet airport in the Grenadines. Internally, we had to unite every part of the country. Thus, we had to build a bridge to span the divide which existed between the northeast of the country, the poorest area, and link that to the rest of the country and build roads. Then, we had to expand the IT infrastructure; in fact we’ve just done some work with fiber optic cables around St. Vincent and between St. Vincent onto the Grenadines and Grenada. It’s a huge project financed by the World Bank to provide first- world internet services. “Also, electricity is very expensive and the question of security of energy supply is problematic. So by Feb. 2022, we will have 80 percent of our electricity generated by renewable sources. We have, at the moment, just about 20 percent by hydro; we have a small percentage by solar and that’s expanding; and we’re now doing geothermal exploration, because St. Vincent is a country of volcanic origin. And we are in the process of getting a new, modern port. “Tourism is full-fledged now. We have 150 square miles of land mass, but we have 11,000 square nautical miles of seascape. So we are aggressively into the fishing area, and expansion is taking place there. And we have just established a modern medical cannabis industry. We’ve issued medical marijuana licenses to different entities from overseas, and several traditional cultivators on St.