The right way for Caroni

July 16, 2001

The entire country must unite on the question of Caroni. Caribbean civilisation, as we know it today, began with the brutal decimation of the first peoples and the establishment of sugar plantations. That is where it all began. And any significant transformation of Caribbean reality will have to begin with the uprooting of all the social relationships and structures that resulted from plantation existence.

What will be the basis of this unity in vision? We said before that "...people unite and coalesce politically around objective programmes of activity geared to fulfil common goals and needs or geared to continuously better the human condition in every way, spiritual and material.

"It stands to reason that the fundamental basis of any unity has to involve the use and distribution of resources that the society either possesses or is organised to produce. The most valuable material resource of any country is its land base, and land use is the fundamental consideration in the process of sustainable social development.

"The largest tracts of land in T&T, not held by private citizens, are those under sugar cultivation and those held by the oil company (Petrotrin) originally for the purpose of land exploration which, because of low output and the great successes of oil and gas finds gained from deep-sea drilling technology, no longer commands the major consideration.

"Sugar is dead as an export commodity of major significance to us, just as land exploration for oil has given way to marine drilling and larger and larger marine reserves of natural gas.

The sugar industry has to be transformed, production may be maintained at a level only for local domestic and industrial consumption and this on the basis of the output of contracted cane farmers, while Caroni Ltd is diversified to do other things in context of a relative programme of land reform.

"We have to break up the old plantation relationships and institute a new arrangement. That was always on the agenda. Previous governments, from the Williams regime onwards, never possessed the moral authority to do this. The Panday regime has this moral authority. The question is, how are they to unite the whole people around a programme of land reform instituted only in Caroni?

"Simple, the land reform has to be nationwide and comprehensive in scope with Caroni as the centre. The holdings of the oil company, Chaguaramas, Tucker Valley, Wallerfield, Tobago etc, will all have to be part of the picture otherwise half of the population will be 'alienated' and only disaster will be the result..."

Those words were written back in 1998. Today, the issue has been pushed onto the front burner, for despite the $2 billion write-off by the Manning government, Caroni Ltd is once again in debt to the public purse to the tune of some $1.7 billion. Finally, all and sundry seems to have come to the realisation that we cannot continue in this manner.

But for a Minister to merely state to the nation that "Caroni will be shut down in June" is not acceptable. That, surely, is the wrong kind of signal. Once again we seem to be approaching the "right thing the wrong way", reflecting thereby our deep-seated cultural malaise of not understanding "process".

This is a massive undertaking to which time limits cannot be placed. It involves the properly-planned utilisation of the proceeds from monetisation of our huge gas reserves. It involves not only physical dismantling, but also mental and cultural reorientation as well as a total re-examination of our view of the region and the world. It is about a whole new way of "seeing and doing".

It will take tremendous political will and statesmanship to pull this off. We must start with the assumption that we are in charge of our world, that our own interests will be the foremost purpose of our being here and that every single soul must be involved.

Dr Spence is quite right in his demand that the very first act is to take all the land, the 50,000-70,000 acres held by Caroni Ltd, and likewise the large tracts held by Petrotrin, and vest it all in the State to be held as the property of all the people, for, as he warned, any divesting of these companies and their land holdings into private hands will "deprive the people of T&T of one of their greatest assets and would do great injustice to future generations..."

We will stand together on this or be blown to bits in internecine warfare as has been done in other plural parts of the world as groups seek to hold advantage and/or concern themselves only with adjusting and redressing probable "historical imbalances".

And there are technical questions still to be researched and solved. The agriculturists need to say what the cane lands, nutritionally depleted over the years through lack of crop rotation, are presently suited to produce today. What agro-based industries can emerge given what we can produce competitively and given our manufacturing and technological advantage in the region?

There is, too, the other side to all this. We are the most aggressive manufacturers in the region and we need the regional market or else our manufacturing sector will crash and devastating unemployment will be the result.

It is good to hear Lockjack of United Brands say that as far as he is concerned, Jamaica and T&T is one market, but one wonders if he is aware of the political and moral responsibility that belies this view.

There is an increasing hostility developing in the region to our lack of reciprocity (did we hear Onandi Lowe, the Jamaican footballer, speak to our reporters at the last World Cup qualifier?) and in political and moral terms we may have to come to terms with this by conceding some areas of agricultural and agro-processing production to our neighbours who may be better placed to perform in certain areas. In this context it has already been established that Guyana can be the breadbasket for the whole region.

There has to be a regional perspective to all our actions. However, in the final analysis, it will be the economic factors that will drive us to extend our federal spirit and resolve, as Prof Ken Ramchand intoned recently, despite our political, and maybe racial, insecurities.

The point is that national land reform and economic transformation is an integrated process that demands examination of all aspects of our life, none the least being our approach to education and measurement.

The ideal of "schools in pan" as espoused by Best, is not to be taken literally for "pan" is really symbolic of "craft originality" and "community", so it is really about schooling built up around special "craft" and around the specificity of "community". It is about putting our civilisation on its head, right side up. It is about we being our own "centre", our own raison d'etre.

That failing in the past caused the Federation to break up, this time it may cause our very distinctiveness as civilisation to disappear altogether. The choice is ours.