PM:
Always environmental challenges during industrial
development
Trinidad Express
Port
Spain
Petroleumworldtt.com
11 19 06
Trinidad and Tobago is facing serious challenges
about how to manage the environment while focussing
on industrial development, Prime Minister Patrick
Manning said yesterday.
He
said because of the government's concern for the
environment, it was forced to shift its policy of
domestic development by accelerating its downstream
activities.
"Man
has to coexist in the environment," Manning
said, noting that one of government's plans was
to develop plastics by 2010 as a downstream industry
of the energy sector.
Manning,
who was opening the new offices of the Kenson Group
of Companies at Lady Hailes Avenue, San Fernando,
said "there will always be debates as to whether
we should industrialise at all, and the extent to
which we should do it".
Kenson
is involved in servicing the energy industry by
providing goods and services to drilling companies
and is headed by San Fernando mayor Kenneth Ferguson.
Manning
said the government will always be faced with the
challenge of how to develop targeted industries
without putting the environment at risk.
He
said sustainable industrial development and the
environment could coexist, but the challenge was
how to bring about the coexistence of both.
Without
naming the controversial aluminium smelters proposed
for Chatham and La Brea, for which government is
currently under fire, Manning said unlike other
countries, Trinidad and Tobago was attaining a higher
standard of living within the democratic system,
and it should not be hijacked by emotion.
He
said the successful entrepreneurs who were involved
in industrial development would not be sidetracked
by emotion or "ole talk", but would sit
and examine their options while, at the same time,
seeing what would take their companies to higher
levels.
One
such company was Kenson's, Manning said.
In
his address, Ferguson said the company started business
in 1995 under his home at La Romaine, then it moved
to Blanche Fraser Street, San Fernando, before the
establishment of the Lady Hailes complex. The number
of employees has grown from 10 to 346, he said
Trinidad
Express
Wednesday, November 15th 2006
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©2006 Trinidad Express . All Rights Reserved.
