By Raffique Shah
December 09, 2024

This global imbalance of trade can explain why so many countries that have productive land can never break into the markets.

Trinidad is what it was 50 years ago, a society fashioned in the image and likeness of the giant to our north, where more democracy can be found in the big toe of a communist than it can be anywhere in the United States of America. This is a country that tells the rest of the world how they must behave to survive. It preaches democracy but practices autocracy. It rules the world with an iron fist, imposing punishing sanctions on others, and it will do everything to wreck countries that dare to defy its rule.

Venezuela and Cuba are but two of living examples of countries punished by the US, their economies shattered such that you’d think they’d waged war and lost. Fortunately for T&T, our oil and gas-based industries have taken us from mere existence as post-colonial economies to the prosperity that we enjoyed, once our minerals flowed in an abundance that was impossible for governments to blow it all in one term.

As someone who has closely monitored how elected governments choose to rule the country, I think, more than most, I have a good grasp of how we got to this sorry pass. In the early 20th century, when the United Kingdom ruled us, they dictated who would hold the power reins and run the show. Not many citizens know that the huge oil refinery at Pointe-a-Pierre was purpose built in the 1930s with the mighty Winston Churchill (who was not prime minister of the UK at the time) directing the project to have it ready for war.

You see, the Gulf of Paria that sits between Venezuela and T&T is the biggest natural harbour in the Caribbean. In the first World War, which ended with a perilously shaky peace accord, Churchill and other warmongers knew they would come up against Adolf Hitler. In fact it seemed almost as if this was a movie, not a real war, as the script was followed to the proverbial “T”. I digress, but bear with me. The allied forces, led by the UK and comprising the US and other European countries, were the most powerful war machine the world had seen until then. And a huge section of this mighty army was charged with ensuring that the Atlantic Ocean sea-lanes and air corridors were fully under their control.

By the time Hitler declared war in 1937, the new but seemingly inconspicuous oil refinery in Pointe-a-Pierre was critical to both Germany and the Allied Forces. There was a significant reason why it produced/refined one main fuel. Fuel-oil, when combined with similar fuel from Venezuela, Aruba and other South American countries, was the main supply in the world.

After the war the shipping lines—mainly owned by British, European, and Americans—had to trim down their fleet sizes and improve their efficiencies to expand the movement of food, textiles, construction material, etc, virtually criss-crossing the shipping lanes of the world. That lesson in war history was necessary to show people in the West how they came to be dependent on foods and other goods manufactured in Europe and the Far East.

This “divvying-up” of world trade—especially foods and machinery, motor vehicles and agricultural equipment—created an arena of exclusivity. It is why countries like ours are hardly ever able to produce these consumables at competitive prices. This method of controlling world trade and forcing the former colonies to eat and wear and use what their colonisers produced, trickled down to ensure that today’s imbalance of trade will never end.

It also guarantees the hold that post-colonial countries exercise on their former colonies. In its simplest form, this global imbalance of trade can be used to explain why so many countries that have productive land and soil types can never break into the markets, or compete with our former masters. It even unravels the mystery of our foreign exchange crisis. Because we consume everything foreign—massive amounts of foods, snacks, fruits, and don’t forget the range of alcoholic beverages and smokes, and owning cars as if they were bicycles. Hell, even our construction materials are foreign.

The pictures I have painted of the wider Caribbean, important parts of their colonial history explaining how the great wars impacted negatively on our economies, are very important. In the heat of battles waged by submarines, gun ships, and other tools of war, the average Trinidadian and Tobagonian perhaps could not see a connection between our current pattern of consumption and the foreign exchange crisis it has landed us in. Or, the crisis that caused the closure of our Pointe-a- Pierre refinery. Many people don’t know how these all tie back into our colonial past.

I will once more encourage my fellow Trinbagonians to adopt the maxim: produce what you consume and consume what you produce.