Face to face with reality

CLYDE WEATHERHEAD

TT IS now into week six of active combat with the covid19 virus.

This situation is forcing us all to reflect on the real (not fanciful) state of many critical aspects of our “happiest place on the face of the Earth.”

Reality is coming face to face with us, hopefully with a most sobering effect.

Covid19 has become the great revealer and has brought reality face to face with us, if we only open our eyes and minds to its messages which are not mixed or spin-doctored.

So many decisions which have been kicked like the proverbial can down the road have hit the end of the cul-de-sac.

Whether in the economy, social, cultural or political spheres, reality demands that we confront the issues.

At the centrepiece of our economic reality is the persistence of the colonial model of one-crop economic structure. Though this time without even a single cash crop of the estates of the empire to earn desperately needed foreign exchange.

The failure and/or refusal to diversify (bad word) our productive base and capacity has left us totally dependent on the hydrocarbon monocrop at a time when its own crisis globally once again threatens the health of our economy, just as covid19 threatens our physical health and existence.

The Russian-Saudi oil price war aimed partly at combatting the US shale advance has had the completely opposite effect as the 1973 OPEC challenge to the big powers of the world. Instead of oil boom, this time we face plummeting prices for a commodity the output of which is also severely diminished.

Gas production, the lifeblood of a hungry, greedily expanded Pt Lisas model, is now becoming financially unattractive as the cost of exploration and extraction increases inversely as price plunges.

The stopgap measures of a “restructured” Petrotrin have not yielded any significant increase in oil production and left us dangerously exposed to supply-chain interruptions spawned by the invisible enemy, the pandemic.

The old export crops have either been eliminated (sugar cane, citrus, coffee, Tobago pigeon peas) or reduced to cottage operations seeking niche markets (cocoa) for small and medium-sized chocolate makers striving to squeeze some benefit out of the struggling remains of our Trinitario flavourful beans that were top dog in the world market in earlier times.

The rejected building blocks are now the missing cornerstones desperately needed to feed ourselves and dampen the constantly escalating food import bill, fuelled by the dominance of the merchant chains that have redesigned our appetites by a combination of demand-creating lifestyle advertising and control of the import supply chains.

It is little surprising that our Agriculture Minister has admonished the population for not accepting his “reality” that there are no feasible alternatives to imported food. After 57 years of independence, we have never developed, far less implemented, a coherent strategic agricultural sector plan.

In fact, as reality now makes plain, we have developed no comprehensive national development plan for the building of an economy that fulfils the needs of the population in all these years.

There has been no planned development of the economy, social structure or political infrastructure to provide any guarantee of the rights of the majority of our body politic.

Our healthcare system has been on a trajectory of tertiary institution building since the abandonment of the primary-care focus of the 1978 WHO Alma Ata Declaration to which we were a signatory.

Will we emerge from this critical moment with a desire for comprehensive planning and real decision-making for development, defining the national purpose as Geddes Granger’s Pegasus project had called for in 1967?

Or will we be provided another round of “magnumicent” dictate by a party in power now growing accustomed to rule by fiat facilitated by a 100-year old Public Health Ordinance and a compliant opposition?

Thankfully, the remnants of our public health system have become central to our response to the viral threat, leaving us to rely on a century-old ordinance to bolster our war to defeat covid19. We owe our health workers a debt of gratitude which we may never be able to calculate, far less satisfy.

Thankfully, also, despite decades of effort to sell our society as a bunch of people just waiting for the next fete or lime and don’t-care people infused with a Carnival mentality, our people have confirmed my faith in them by, in absolute majority, acting magnificently with responsibility and care for one another and ensuring that covid19’s threat is minimised.

One can only hope that at least a larger portion of the body politic awakens to the necessity of the direction advocated in the first people-developed plan presented in 1967.

The fact that the call for national purpose by some citizens has emerged in the conversation amid the current challenge points in that direction.