$2M to host Tobago Heritage Festival

The 2003 Tobago Heritage Festival is being staged at a cost of some $2 million. “Our Heritage: A Legacy To Treasure” is the theme of this 16th edition of the island’s premier cultural showcase which runs from July 13 to August 1.

The disclosures were made by Festival Chairman, Senator Rawle Titus, during a media luncheon at the Blue Crab Restaurant which preceded the formal launch of the annual cultural potpourri in Scarborough yesterday. “The cost of the Festival is nothing that one can easily estimate beforehand. We do know however that it will cost between $1.5 and $2 million — the entire Festival,” Titus told Newsday. “It will cost about that: that would be infrastructure, the entire production cost, the costuming of the groups, the transportation, you name it, it will cost about that,” he explained.

At the same time, on the question of marketing the popular annual event, Titus lamented this was one area of serious shortcoming over the years by the planners/organisers. The issue of marketing has always been a sore point in terms of inadequate funds. “I must admit one of the shortcomings of the whole planning machinery for the Festival over the years, over its life since ‘87, has been that shortage of an input of sufficient resources into marketing!” he declared. “I don’t think that enough effort was placed on marketing. This (Festival) Committee observed it last year, and we are making every effort to ensure that a substantial amount of the resources would be placed into marketing. You know, I really feel that we made an error there not to put the kind of funds into marketing that we needed to put,” Titus acknowledged.