T&T Chamber gets first female president
PORT SPAIN
Trinidad & Tobago Guardian
Petroleumworldtt.com
03 24 09
After 130 years of existence, the country's leading business organisation, the T&T Chamber of Industry and Commerce, yesterday elected its first female president —businesswoman Angella Persad took over the reins of power from advertising executive, Ian Collier. By coincidence, the Tobago Division of the chamber, also elected a woman, Vernie Shield, as its chairman at its annual general meeting on Monday.
In her inaugural speech at the Hyatt Regency Trinidad Hotel, 1 Dock Road, Port-of-Spain, Persad called for “a serious focus on diversification” of the economy. She said the current economic situation had shown “quite dramatically” that T&T's high dependence on energy “is dangerous and opportunistic, and can lead to serious fluctuations and volatility in our national wealth.” She added that interest rates had to be reduced to encourage investment, especially in new industries. Persad said that local businesses cannot compete globally with a prime lending rate set at 13 per cent. She said T&T must identify sectors in which the country can use its natural skills and resources to develop products for world scale export.
“This diversification thrust must include adequate investment of financial and human resources, appropriate incentives to encourage investment in the sectors and share the risk with the private sector, facilitating appropriate skills training through the various learning institutions, and providing seed funding where necessary to kick-start certain industries.” She said possible areas for diversification included tourism, information and communication technology and financial services which offered “tremendous opportunity” for branding T&T on the global landscape. The need for economic diversification was one of four priority areas on which Persad said the chamber would lobby the Government over her one-year term. She identified the other priorities as pursuing the chamber's continuing fight against crime; improving productivity levels in the country and an increased thrust for the development of the micro and small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) sector.
On crime, Persad said T&T's crime rate had increased to such an extent that the murder rate for the first three months of the year had risen to 116 by yesterday. She said this was both unprecedented and unacceptable. She said there was also need for “drastic improvement” in productivity levels in T&T, adding that this country had fallen to 92nd on the 2009 Global ompetitivenes Index, down from 66th in 2005 and 36th in 2001. Persad said the chamber was looking forward to the early start-up of the National Productivity Council, a tripartite agreement among Government, business and labour to set standards and benchmarks for improving productivity.
She said the growing unemployment anticipated as the economic downturn bites can be turned into self-employment. Persad said SMEs can provide community development and productive jobs for large numbers of workers who may be laid off from plants in a particular area such as Pt Lisas, where workers may have already been affected by plant closures. “Government must be ready and willing to support this sector by means of special funding, training and nurturing through business incubation, as this is where resourcefulness and creativity may spawn some of tomorrow's entrepreneurs and develop pockets of growth, both in services and productive enterprise,” she said.
Story by
Verne Burnett from Trinidad & Tobago Guardian
Trinidad & Tobago Guardian
March 17th, 2009
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