Tobagonians: Watch Your Gas

VANUS JAMES

From all accounts, Shell is about to start extracting gas from Block 22 and NCMA-4, interests in which it acquired from Centrica in 2016. The deal, which included Centrica’s 17 per cent stake in NCMA-1, was worth US$30 million and further payments if Block 22 and NCMA-4 reached agreed production milestones. Shell’s plan is to pipe the proceeds to the gas-processing facilities at Atlantic LNG in Trinidad.

Why is this significant for Tobagonians?

As I reported back in 2012 when Centrica was planning its investments, all of Block 22, 96 per cent of NCMA-4 are squarely in Tobago, washing its shores by any sensible definition. NCMA-4 is immediately west of Crown Point while Block 22 is due North of NCMA-4 and washes Tobago’s North Coast. Add this to the fact that BHP Billiton has recently announced major gas finds in block TTDAA-14, which is due east of Tobago and again squarely in Tobago’s waters.

Shell is currently undertaking a social impact assessment of its activities, and presumably anticipates paying some compensation to fisherfolk for disruption of fish stocks and fish production when gas extraction begins. The importance of compensation to the disrupted fisherfolk should not be underestimated. However, such compensation will amount to a few million dollars at most.

For Tobagonians collectively, there is a much bigger impact at stake. Exploitation of the patrimony in the Tobago gas fields represents a substantial opportunity for Tobagonians to launch a strong push for economic development that could secure bright prospects for future generations. For 130 years in this political union with Trinidad, workers and businesses in Tobago have depended on Trinidad for annual transfers to support employment and sales.

Every year, Tobago’s budgets reveal that the transfers are insufficient to fund adequate development of our education, healthcare, water supplies, ICT, and pensions. They cannot provide savings that could finance development of high-productivity activities that provide good jobs for workers stuck in low-quality and low wage government underemployment, including in CEPEP and URP. The resulting lack of economic development has caused a continuous drain of our skills, capital and entrepreneurship to Trinidad, leaving Tobago to languish economically.

As a result, for 130 years, Tobagonians have been like the Children of Israel, wandering in the wilderness of Trinidad, New York, and pretty much everywhere else, while watching Tobago languish from afar.

Gas production in Tobago could bring an end to all that under-financing by providing resources that Tobagonians could use to set up a well-conceived and highly diversified sustainable tourism development programme.

Such a programme would need to go well beyond investment in 1,000 rooms at Buccoo to be managed by Sandals, just as we have always known we need a lot more than investment in 200 rooms at Magdalena to develop a tourism sector. A well-conceived programme would invest in other profitable service exports that could provide good alternative jobs for workers stuck in low-quality government underemployment. It would generate employment for the high-skilled Tobagonians who usually migrate to develop a good career, and attract high-skilled workers, capital and entrepreneurship from abroad to help sustain the investments.

At the same time, these new industries would raise productivity and generate high profits and taxes that create the savings needed to make them sustainable in the future.

Tobago’s current share of national savings is too low to finance such investments but all that could change with a fair share of the proceeds from the LNG exports that Shell anticipates. The right to a fair share is partly a matter of natural island rights, but also a matter of constitutional rights.

In that context, Tobagonians should be deeply concerned with government’s upcoming amendments of the Constitution to provide internal self-government for Tobago. What is Tobago in those amendments?

As of the last version put before the Joint Select Committee, government is proposing to restrict Tobago’s jurisdiction to 11-miles from its shores. That amendment will effectively remove Block 22, NCMA-4, TTDAA-14 and the other gas fields of Tobago from its jurisdiction and place them under Trinidad’s control. Tobago will have no constitutional right to a say in what happens to the revenues they generate.

The 11-mile boundary is a travesty and a land-grab that most Tobagonians reject, and rightly so. The right answer is that in Trinidad and Tobago as currently defined, there is a median line equi-distant from the southern shores of Tobago and the northern shores of Trinidad. Everything northwards of that median line is Tobago and everything southwards is Trinidad. That Tobago is what the Constitution should recognise. Tobagonians should insist on it and use the resulting jurisdiction to gain a fair share of the gas patrimony provided in Adam’s will. Then, we use the proceeds to jump-start real development on the island.