I did not realise that people from Laventille and Beetham were former cane cutters. According to the Express online our Prime Minister told the United Nations General assembly that the rising crime in Trinidad and Tobago and the Caribbean was as a result of the loss of preferential markets for the export of banana and sugar. Although this may have been a general statement to include all the Caricom countries, I don’t like it. This statement implies that the former farmers of the now defunct Caroni (1975) Limited are responsible for the upsurge in crime in Trinidad and Tobago. We all know that is utter nonsense. Unless the cane workers formed some kind of gang that we don’t know about and are currently wreaking havoc on the nation. I know of one farmer who was a known criminal and that was Dole Chadee and who knows if he was really a farmer, that story could have been urban legend. This is probably why the crime is also getting out of control because law enforcement raiding Beetham and locking down Laventille all the time and they leaving the former cane workers to run amok.
The other problem I have with the statement is that it sounds like we are blaming our former colonial rulers for the rate of crime in our country. When as a people we would learn to start accepting responsibility of our own action or inaction as the case may be. We have been independent for forty-seven years, it is time that we move away from trying to be dependent on our former masters for anything. It also seems like we are trying to guilt them into give us back some sort of preferential markets again. Why we so? Why do we need preferential markets? Preferential markets don’t provide incentives to develop competitive production, it limits diversification, and it promotes a focus on primary products as opposed to refined or processed products. So essentially what we in the Caribbean should have done was instead of stopping the production of banana and sugar we should have continued and found something to do with the produce, maybe candied bananas. That way we could have told those people to hull their skin with their preferential markets. While there were obvious benefits to preferential markets, if it is no longer available to us then don’t cry over spilt milk. Make something else work for us. We should be looking forward not backwards. I expected more from Prime Minister Manning.
The other problem I have with the statement is that it sounds like we are blaming our former colonial rulers for the rate of crime in our country. When as a people we would learn to start accepting responsibility of our own action or inaction as the case may be. We have been independent for forty-seven years, it is time that we move away from trying to be dependent on our former masters for anything. It also seems like we are trying to guilt them into give us back some sort of preferential markets again. Why we so? Why do we need preferential markets? Preferential markets don’t provide incentives to develop competitive production, it limits diversification, and it promotes a focus on primary products as opposed to refined or processed products. So essentially what we in the Caribbean should have done was instead of stopping the production of banana and sugar we should have continued and found something to do with the produce, maybe candied bananas. That way we could have told those people to hull their skin with their preferential markets. While there were obvious benefits to preferential markets, if it is no longer available to us then don’t cry over spilt milk. Make something else work for us. We should be looking forward not backwards. I expected more from Prime Minister Manning.
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