Slipping
education into gas brains
Newsday
Port
Spain
Petroleumworldtt.com
06 04 07
An
address by President George Maxwell Richards
was delivered at the Arthur Lok Jack Graduate
School
of Business at the second Annual Business and Culture
Week Event on Monday May 14, 2007. It was titled, “Education
for Diversification”
Excerpts of his presentation are presented below
:
Trinidad
and Tobago is endowed with a measure of petroleum
and gas reserves. In absolute terms
these are minuscule and represent less than one
third of one per cent of the world’s proven
reserves. Significantly, however, Trinidad and
Tobago has been successful in monetising these
resources. Indeed, it represents the world’s
very first gas economy in the sense that no other
economy, developed or developing, had previously
been created (and continues to function successfully)
which is dependent on natural gas as opposed to
the many other economies which are mineral or petroleum,
that is to say, oil, dependent. Not surprisingly,
it has become a model for other gas producing countries.
Having
some little background in energy myself, I have
witnessed with much satisfaction and pleasure,
the exciting growth that has taken place over the
past 25 years in the energy sector in Trinidad
and Tobago. For a small country with relatively
limited resources in hydrocarbons to have taken
a leadership role in the gas industries — both
in the Atlantic and in the Americas — is
really quite remarkable. This sector now clearly
has a life of its own but it may well be limited
in its future growth by the availability of our
hydrocarbon resources.
WASTING ASSETS
We
must always be cognisant of the fact that oil
and gas are wasting assets which must be used to
foster for the longer term more sustainable economic
and industrial activity in a diversified economy.
Given the estimated current ‘proven’ gas
reserves to production ratio, and assuming no further
success in our exploration efforts, the worst case
scenario, Trinidad and Tobago has only a 12-15
year window of opportunity for development of the
non-energy sector. Here, let me repeat and make
it abundantly clear that this is the worst case
scenario which I confidently expect will not arise.
Indeed, I have not taken “probable” and “possible” reserves
into consideration.
Investment decisions have been or are soon likely
to be made on a number of new projects including
two aluminium smelters, a new iron and steel complex,
an ethane-based ethylene/polyethylene complex,
a maleic anhydride processing facility and a gas-to-liquids
plant. Some of these proposed projects represent
a new phase in the development of higher value
added products in the natural gas sub-sector. Opportunities
must continue to be aggressively explored for driving
the petrochemical industry further downstream by
diversifying, deepening and widening the sector
by producing secondary and tertiary products. This
approach would appear to represent the optimum
utilisation of our not unlimited natural gas stock.
The
foundation of social and economic development
and growth is a highly educated population and
in today’s technol ogically driven world
an essential element of this is tertiary level
education and training in science, innovation,
technology, entrepreneurship and management. In
this regard, therefore, arguably the most important
asset available to us is our pool of highly trained
men and women — for it is on the understanding
and work of these people that effective action
in national development finally rests.
Increasingly, and whether we like it or not, the
world is more and more being made up of societies
in which economic value is derived from knowledge,
especially scientific and technical knowledge.
We in this country must therefore look for our
future economic and social well-being to innovation
and technology rather than solely to reliance on
the exploitation of our natural and physical resources,
important through this may be in the short and
medium terms. The experience of Finland which has
transformed its economy from one dependent on natural
resources, in her case, Forestry, to one at the
top of the list of most indices of global competitiveness
is instructive.
Therefore, as we in Trinidad and Tobago confront
a changing world economy, we must increasingly
look for our future economic and social well-being
to products of the human intellect rather than
solely to products which our soil can be made to
nourish or produce; or our petroleum and gas reservoirs
to yield. It is therefore urgent and imperative
that our society becomes far more knowledge-based
than one predominantly dependent on materials.
The present and future are knowledge-based, the
implication being that the third industrial revolution
through which the more developed countries are
now living is largely concerned with intellectual
development.
IT REVOLUTION
Certainly, the IT revolution has long been with
us and the application of artificial intelligence
to manufacture, to organisational systems and to
communications systems strikes at many of the foundations
of our present society. Already nationhood is being
challenged (or ignored) by the multinational companies.
From the viewpoint of industry and commerce, national
boundaries are already of small significance. Transnational
market forces are imposing international standards
onto all trading nations: first the metric system
of measurement, then the standard operating voltages,
frequencies, communications channels, computer
and human languages and currencies. In Europe,
the European Union is steadily imposing these standards
on the community states.
BREAK WITH
TRADITIONAL APPROACH
The knowledge-base underlying these developments
requires intelligent inputs from a wide variety
of people. The efficiency with which different
countries respond to the challenges of technology
transfer and skills transfer will determine the
level of difficulty or ease with which their peoples
will confront the social and industrial changes
imposed upon them by their vulnerability to changes
elsewhere. It will remain true that those best
able to cope with change are those who are already
at its leading edge. By the same token those left
behind by change risk becoming ever more obsolescent.
This is the way of the poor becoming poorer. (And
the road to high structural unemployment). We therefore
have, in this situation, an even greater responsibility
to educate and train our people to seize opportunities
thrown up by rapid changes in industry. That it
can be done is plainly evident in the burgeoning
successes of South Korea and the other countries
in South East Asia, all able to challenge the United
States of America.
It
is now abundantly clear that knowledge has become
the critical factor in shaping economic
life as well as, I might add, social and cultural
values. While there is no simple correlation between
spending on tertiary education and economic growth,
there is plenty of evidence, for example, that
there is a strong correlation between a country’s
higher education attainment levels and its economic
prosperity. We therefore need to have enough world-class
higher education capacity to foster innovation
and technical excellence.
For
these reasons, the well-being of our higher education
system is of prime importance to our
economic future. Indeed, it should be noted that
global competition among the world’s higher
education institutions is intensifying and that
Asian countries, for example, are devoting enormous
resources to expanding and upgrading their university
systems.
Although tertiary level student enrolment in Trinidad
and Tobago has been growing rapidly in the last
five years or so, I venture to suggest that much
less than 10% of our working-age population has
achieved this level of education. This compares
with 38% in the United States, 36% in Japan and
26% in South Korea.
As a country, we invest much less than 1% of our
GDP in higher education. While this represents
a substantial increase within recent years, it
is far behind the performance of countries like
Australia (1.5 percent), Canada (2.3 percent) and
the US (2.6 percent).
Moreover,
in Trinidad and Tobago, private finance plays
only an extremely role in university funding.
Private finance in the US amounts to 1.4 percent
of GDP, and 2.4% in South Korea; compared with
less than 0.1% for Trinidad and Tobago. We need
to develop a culture of private philanthropy. We
need also to aggressively foster the tradition
of raising money from alumni. At Harvard, for example,
the University’s endowment fund now comfortably
exceeds $20 billion US.
It
has been suggested by the European Commission
and others that in a modernised university system,
a total investment of some two percent of GDP is
the absolute minimum required for knowledge — intensive
economies.
If close to 2% of GDP in higher education cannot
be invested, we cannot claim to be building a knowledge
economy. Investment in science and technology education
needs therefore to be increased considerably.
In
the context of education, I should like to highlight
what I considered to be the extremely
urgent need for us, as a country to focus increased
attention on the non-energy sector — and
in particular manufacturing and the application
of platform technologies — to achieve a level
of balance in our economic development and provide
needed diversification to our growth. We must have
the courage to break with traditional approaches
and consolidate the role of science, technology
and innovation in our development strategies. We
must focus on key sources of economic growth, such
as an advanced and state-of-the-art manufacturing
sector which is founded on the use of new and established
scientific and technical knowledge. We need to
recognise the benefits to be derived from advances
in science and technology and develop strategies
to harness the explosion in new knowledge. In this
regard, a modern manufacturing sector must also
acknowledge the potential role of existing technologies,
especially platform technologies, such as biotechnology,
nanotechnology, new materials and information and
communications technology which have broad applications
and impacts in the economy.
Newsday
Thursday,
May 31 2007
Copyright
©2007 Newsday. All Rights Reserved.
