The hard reality of a new normal

MINISTER OF Health Terrence Deyalsingh reiterated last week that any decision to reopen the economy will be driven by science and decided on by the Prime Minister. Any lifting of restrictions, despite the positive evaluations of this nation’s response to the threat of spread, will be slow and measured.

The personal cautions that are already in place – the use of masks, the distancing, the limits on people in enclosed spaces and limited public gatherings – will remain with us, as with the rest of the world, for the rest of the year.

The changes will reshape the economy in macro scale and create seismic changes on the micro level. Any business that thrives on having people in close proximity to each other as a driver for its profits will either need to dramatically remodel its systems or face destruction. Restaurants, a haven for many citizens, will need to rethink both their infrastructure and their business models.

Covid19 has forced the most primal of change imperatives in the world, evolve or die. That means changes in government planning, in business strategy and, most intimately, for individuals to new and different lifestyles. The diversification that we have been flirting with for almost a decade will now need to be pressed into practice with a commitment to real-world results.

Our grim economic reality has been driven as much by the fragility of global petroleum markets as it has by the demands of controlling covid19, but the one-two punch to the economy means that there can no longer be a state strategy to continue the crowd-pleasing deficit budgets that have become an annual national norm.

The news in the oil and gas sector has not only been bad over the last two months, it’s been in a troubling spiral for more than a year now. Four plants in Point Lisas have paused operations pending reversals in the market. The TT economy has contracted incrementally in 2016, 2017 and 2018. There is little hope that 2019 was any better.

If 2020 is not managed with firm care and a more aggressively entrepreneurial outlook, it will become the hard slide that four years of slips have been leading to. The oil and gas sector will need significant reassessment, and we may need to push our petroleum sector resources up the value chain, using our natural resources as the bedrock of new industries.

TT must lead initiatives to make Caricom an interlocked business sector playing to our respective strengths, encouraging regional growth, co-operation and economic competitiveness. We, these islands of the Caribbean, are in this together, our shared challenges and geography an opportunity for the unified approach to global strength that has eluded the region for far too long.