Developed status?

October 13, 2004

I have always had problems with these oversimplified concepts, usually driven by certain buzz words. I can recall doing an essay while attending the Sir George Williams University in Montreal on a quotation by Mahatma Gandhi that "nations should not be judged or measured by their power over others but by their capacity to share and assist the impoverished and by their internal dynamism and capacity for human development..." or words to that effect.

In that essay I railed about the insipid labels of "developed" and "underdeveloped" and the need to attach moral questions to our comparative paradigms.

The quite old professor, a Ms Proctor, did not give me the highest marking that she had given to a Canadian student but after she dared to read the two respective essays to the class there arose a massive howl of protest.

In her own defence she advised the class that "despite the content and power of Mr Rennie's argument, his essay does contain a few rather unusual or faulty sentence constructions."

I had just turned 22. Sometime later when I was bailed out of jail by the T&T Government, I do recall though that that same old lady was the only one who wrote to me offering to come to court, if it would help, to testify about my "sterling character." I have often wondered about that offer and what may have motivated it.

I have argued constantly in this space, even as recent as the last column, that "development" has less to do with the quantum of revenue a country generates and more to do with the quality of life it creates because of the choices upon which it expends. It has more to do with the system of relationships that obtains in a said society and the comfort, happiness and security that its citizens derive from these relationships.

When citizens are happy and secured, there usually is no credibility gap between the government, whatever its form, and the governed. There is a nexus. There is connection.

Much of the benchmarks that have been identified as crucial on the road to "developed status" signify very little. For instance, we are being told that "free tertiary education for all by 2008" shall be a benchmark on that road to "developed status" yet Barbados has already accomplished that but we do not describe Barbados as developed.

Likewise, we have only now pegged old age pension at $1,150 a month, when in Barbados it has already been pegged at $1,500 and is paid in bi-monthly tranches occasioning prudence and thereby savings.

Is Barbados more developed as a result? Barbados never had and never will have bigger revenues that T&T but theirs has always been a much more studied approach to process and therefore they get more values than us for every dollar expended.

Any journalist doing random street interviews in Port-of-Spain and Bridgetown will be shocked at the disparity in the levels of expression and awareness of issues.

In Barbados the only bottles allowed are glass bottles which can be recycled. There are no plastic bottles to contribute to the destruction of the environment as in T&T and, in addition, there are no heaps of garbage and dead dogs left about the place to be shredded on spot either by stray animals or the wheels of passing cars. It is all about intelligent functioning. We do the very opposite here and should be the last to talk about "developed" and "developing."

There is now a claim that unemployment has been reduced to seven per cent. That I know is hardly likely. However, in the so-called "developed" countries five per cent unemployment or thereabouts is regarded as full employment, so are we now to assume that we are "developed"?

On the other hand, if we are to take Gandhi's view, then social deliverables, implementation and human transformation becomes the be-all and end-all of the process. However, in that respect and context, T&T is woefully backward.

The Government last year announced via the Self-Help Commission the availability of $10,000 grants for house repairs for the socially destitute who possess no means of income. I know for a fact that only one person in the whole of Tunapuna got such a grant.

One of the interesting factors about the levels of revenue that we are presently experiencing and which only a few commentators have indicated is that for the first time it is not only a result of the exchange rate and the price of oil and gas but this time it is also a result of the level of output and production of oil and gas.

People like Lloyd Best have advanced the view therefore that what we are experiencing now is not an ordinary cyclical boom but a prolonged period of prosperity which may very well last for the next 15 to 20 years, providing this country with the best-ever opportunity to diversify and transform the economic realities.

The history of T&T and most of the Caribbean islands have been the history of monocultures ie one-crop or one-source economies-first tobacco, then sugar, then bananas, then oil, now gas, produced for export with very little impact on the process of building an integrated home market.

Immediately the question was asked: if we are to develop the non-energy sector, what are the indigenous products that we can manufacture that will have an international demand that is constant like oil and gas?

The answer in my view is that first and foremost the raison d'être of any local non-energy sector must be the satisfaction of local and regional demands, that is, direct consumption demands ie food to satisfy people's immediate habits and tastes as well as production demands which involve the production of primary materials for further processing and refining.

Once the local/regional demands on these two levels are satisfied then we turn to the international market to export excess capacity. That is putting ourselves right side up and turning around our history of "export or bust."

There are areas we can turn to quite readily and create products that have international demand. We can go back to our high-grade cocoa which was abandoned and can easily be revitalised. We can go on to by-products of petroleum such as plastics and with gas as fuel we can do aluminium products with bauxite from Guyana and Jamaica. Our asphalt production is begging to be modernised to extract all the combined properties of this product- eg road paving, waterproofing, skid resistance etc, so that the production of our asphalt and its by-products can stand up in the world. And last but not least there is big international demand for our cultural products-pan, calypso (with all its variants) and mas.

They are the latent industries of our intellect and imaginative wit. Only the blind cannot see that.