Opinion
- Editorial- Commentary
Keith
Smith:
When
the gas line ends
Let me ask you something - if the story was that
gas would run out in 2112 - would you have given
it a second thought? Not 2012, mark you, but 2112.
Or 2212. Or 2312? Or 2412? Or 2512? Clearly nothing
so concentrates the mind of a citizen as when he
hears of the possibility - dim as it might be -
that his country's economic lifeline will collapse
in his lifetime.
Or
her/his children's lifetime, I suppose? And,
even after his/her grandchildren's? But what,
after
that, I wonder? Does the term "future generations" have
any real resonance for Jane and Joe Public beyond
a certain calendar span? And should it - the idea
here being that those who are here now have an
open-ended responsibility for those who'll come
next and next and next and next and...
Whatever
the Government's "grind" over
the "doomsday" nervousness which rippled
through the society following the Ryder Scott report
it did serve to concentrate the collective mind
on the possibility - certainty really, unless God
is not only Trinidadian but PNM too - that one
day, a hundred years from now or 200 or 300 or
400 or 500, the gas will run out.
And where would Trinidad and Tobago be then?
Listen, in and around the NAR time, when the politics
was a bit more fluid and the intellectual debates
far more focused, I remember economist Trevor Farrell
(he and Lloyd Best not then tilting against each
other) recounting the story of a place whose major
resource - its only resource really - happened
to be guano, which is composed chiefly of bird
droppings and valued as a fertiliser.
I
don't remember exactly what Dr Farrell said happened
- it might have been its high price owing,
partly, to a Peruvian monopoly of the principal
source, or it may be that the birds just stopped
dropping their droppings there. Where "there''
was I also don't remember - it might have been
the Chincha Islands in Peru - but the islanders
awoke one morning and:
"No
guano!"
Such a scenario is not set to happen to Trinidad
and Tobago's gas - at least not in quite that way
- but I took Dr Farrell's point, endlessly made
by others, albeit not in such a graphically impactful
way, which was that no place is guaranteed unending
access to excessive natural resources and I also
took his point, made at another time, that there
is no fixed straight line between developing and
developed country status, assuming that you accept
the international agencies' breakdown of the world
which Dr Farrell did and Mr Best didn't.
That last there being an inconsequential aside
simply for the sake of journalistic flourish, the
thing being that gas is going to run out sooner
or later and even if we believe, as our geologist
Prime Minister obviously does, that it is going
to be later rather than sooner the question still
remains - how we are going about now preparing
for a gas-less future then?
Now I know that the Government has set up funds
to hedge our economic bets, as it were, but I
also know that it had to be persuaded, if not
prodded, into going down that long haul road
Mr Manning's first reaction, if you remember,
being that the continued incoming wealth had
to be expended on the country's infrastructural
and other needs now.
He could not but have been partly correct in this,
but I have often wondered whether this administration's
heart is really into not only saving but in using
our extensive and annually extending wealth to
so set it up that the day when the gas line dries
up or when, perhaps, the gas-importing part of
the world moves away from its heavy dependency
on those lines, will not be a day of doom but of
collective acclamation over what would have been
studied and ultimately successful deliberation.
In fairness one would have to say, as I have said,
that the administration's proposed - still proposed
- spending on the arts is a marked step in this
direction but we - or rather they that come after
and after and after - are not going to be able
to live by the foreign exchange proceeds from
chutney, calypso, mas, steelband, tassa, theatre,
dragon boats, stick fighting, rum, roti, cascadoo,
bake and shark, Ram Leela, Emancipation, Divali,
Eid, Shouter Baptist Day and all things tourism
alone.
All which, it seems to me, demands that high priority
be given to, well, what I venture to call intense,
and always intensifying, futuristic studies to
determine, as far as any human being, however visionary
can, what is there in and around us that we can
use the wealth God, as Mr Manning makes out, has
given us, to grease productive enterprise that
will keep us out of a hole when we and Mr Manning's
manna (to upside-down the Bible-believers' miracle)
ceases to come out of a hole.
This
column was written before Mr Manning's statement
identifying a pivotal role for agriculture in T&T's
future economic development.
Food for future thoughts
I hope that the Prime Minister does not expect
anybody to think that agricultural products would
ever be able to bring in the corresponding revenue
whenever gas/oil stops coming out of holes in our
small piece of Mother Earth, be that in 2019, 2119,
2219, 2319, 2419 or 2519.
Mr Manning is a politician and politicians have
a way of putting things in a way if not to fool
then, certainly, to cool people, all the jumping
up and down from the general misreading (Mr Manning's
take, anyway) of the Ryder Scott report back-burnered,
for a while, by his robust declarations re the
agricultural road ahead.
A
bit too pat, for me, Pat. Listen, like mother's
milk you can't be against investment in agriculture,
particularly in the context of concerted criticism
over the years (decades!) at the way we have, well,
back-burnered agriculture as gas and oil became
the nation's lifeline, the now dead "Dougla''
in Jomo Watuse's composition sarcastically predicting
that we go eat oil.
Metaphorically, of course, that is exactly what
we have been doing - and quite happily, too, waistlines
expanding and obesity setting in as ham became
not a Christmas but a routinely casual thing, life's
quality assessed by the family's ability to move
away from how we used to eat when more of us were
poor.
Had he been here to listen Spoiler, for one, would
have tumbled on the sweetness of the irony, Mr
Manning making out that agriculturalisation is
now to be the new energisation, the PM in one fell
swoop simultaneously seeming to address the twin
political hot potatoes of high food prices and
lowered gas expectations, the man's smile as he
drove home as wide, I am willing to bet, as the
new house he is building for us in St Ann's.
Still, as I said, who could quarrel with any move
to "move agricultural production to unprecedented
heights in this country,'' this country, of course
being Trinidad and Tobago where the family's
Lambeau land laughs on receiving the most cavalierly
thrown seed, corn and other crops coming, whatever
the disinterest of its absentee landlords, this
Trinidadianised East/West Corridor remnant of
the family having long abandoned its agricultural
roots, planted as we now are in the easier good
life of supermarket and - ha, ha! - PriceSmart!
So one waits, even as we are asked to salute super
farms, for the details such as how the rural, which
is to say the Indo, farming community is going
to be incorporated in the aggrandised agricultural
programme, hoping to hear, too, how the urban,
which is to say, the Afro community is going to
rally to it, the great trick being to achieve the
cultural shifts required not simply to aggrandise
agriculture but to industrialise it since the take-off
point is to produce food not only for local but
foreign consumption - the foreign exchange on oil
and gas being what now keeps the economy thundering
over - Angostura Bitters being used in dashes,
yes, but billions and billions of dashes the world
over.
It is not that I (we?) cannot be persuaded or rallied
to the cause. It is that the Prime Minister's
promises are all very well and good but the case
made is far from complete Mr Manning, given the
politics of the moment, not making the concession
that the New Agriculture, even assuming unprecedented
success, can hardly but be one arrow in the energy-replacement
bow, resurrection not coming overnight or even
in three days or three years, the work required
to organise for the future, as far as humanly
possible, still needing to be done - unless,
of course, all this is ruse and the underlying
rationale is that Trinidad and Tobago will be
able to rely on manna coming out of a hole for
as long as Mr Manning is around and so long after
as not to matter to any of us or even our children's
children, the point of politics West Indian-style
being the electoral now and let the far-off then
take the hindmost. Ending then, where we began
- do you care one fig about a 2120 future?
Friday,
August 17th 2007
Keith
Smith is
a columnist of The Trinidad Express.
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Editor's
Note: This article was first publish in Trinidad
Express, August
16 and 17, 2007 . Petroleumworld
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08/18/07
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