Destroying competitive advantages

THE EDITOR: Blame no-one for enjoying the benefits of subsidies. Take the gasoline subsidy. In former days it was a way to allow citizens, businesses and manufacturers to have a share in the petro-wealth, which is due to them under the Constitution and in normal discourse by any healthy system of governance, in the common good.

What has taken its place are: 1. a burden on the economy, 2. the cause of having to remove subsidies and 3. the removing of competitive advantage – all baseless.

The Rowley Government is exporting crude for it to be refined elsewhere, and then having to import gasoline, etc, to supply the nation's needs. It never talks about it in this way because it would open up the question of the format of remuneration.

From what we have heard, remuneration is not direct; rather, what has been instituted is a mix of different things like index pricing – which depresses returns – and set-offs – by which different things are bargained upon, with and without precision. Moreover, the actual amount of crude extracted cannot be fairly accounted for, and just how shipments are divided among separate refineries is secret.

In overview, it will be found that there is nothing "ecological" or "going green" about it. All it does is subserve the interests of the foreign firms that got these one-sided advantages for themselves, through the Government allowing it to be done in that fashion.

The other missing piece in this big picture is that the nation's energy industry cannot and will never diversify properly on such a platform.

E GALY

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