Caroni lands and the IMF

The Editor: It is said that in the theatre of life, if one should cast his eyes away from the character on centre stage and look at the other players, an entirely different picture emerges.

While Couva South MP, the resurrected Kelvin “Lazarus” Ramnath was delivering his threatening, bellicose speech, the television camera momentarily focussed on former Minister of Finance, Gerald Yetming. It was a picture of discomfort. There he was with head bowed and between his hands as if to say, he preferred to be anywhere else than be part of the distortion Ramnath was presenting before the House. The issue was of course, the government offer of VSEP to Caroni workers.  Mr Yetming perhaps was reflecting on his last stint as finance minister. It was reported that he had prepared when the company was to be liquidated. Basdeo Panday and his latest surrogate Rudy Indarsingh have now declared war on VSEP. Panday with his current troubles needs a lifeboat while Indarsingh’s future and existence are threatened with the looming future for Caroni; VSEP for the Caroni workers could mean the end of his union.

What Ramnath, Panday, Inarsingh and their party should tell their followers is the truth. Though out of the clutches of the IMF, Trinidad and Tobago, the Caribbean and all developing countries on the globe must now wrestle with an even more formidable economic beast, the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which is the true culprit. When George Bush the first heralded the New World Order at the end of his terms of office in the early 1990s, this is what he was talking about. Soon enough the banana and sugar industries in the Caribbean were targeted for dismantling. Most European countries  had granted preferential treatment to their former colonies giving them quotas and guaranteed markets. In the wake of NAFTA (North American Free Trade Area), the Americans and others protested to the WTO and even went to the World Court against this preferential treatment. They won, killing Caribbean bananas and sugar almost overnight.  

Sugar workers on whose backs Panday, Ramnath and the UNC rode into Parliament should ask them why in the six years the party occupied office could they not have solved the woes of sugar workers. The answer is simple, they could not. Third World sugar was marked for death by forces more powerful than any of the politicians we have here. In the New World Order, business enterprises which cannot adapt to survive are left to die. In one such case, Xerox, the printing giant suddenly found itself confronted with the personal computer married to ink jet printers which could flawlessly produce professional looking documents. The result was over 60,000 job losses across America and more world wide. Caroni 1975 Ltd. owns the largest portion of state lands — some 750,000 acres — and this is the prize the two major tribes are after.  Ramnath boldly claims that he and his people have historical claims to these lands, The Hindu Credit Union has also made claims on similar grounds. Perhaps this means that on account of Indians being involved in the sugar industry for the last 150 odd years the lands belong to them.

Ramnath and the HCU should revisit the history books. When African slaves were brought to this country it was covered with dense forest. Free African labour was used to cut this formidable acreage and transform it into the rolling cane fields of today. This was followed by long years of bitter unpaid toil. When slavery ended in the Caribbean in 1938 the slaves left the sugar estates in droves, making room for the introduction of Indians, who unlike the slaves were paid for their labour which was contracted (indentureship). In lieu of passage back to India when the contracts expired they were given land and/or money and remained in Trinidad where they found life much better than home on their motherland. This is a fact. Indians are no more entitled to state lands than any other group of Trinidad and Tobago citizens. If anyone was deprived it was the Africans who are still seeking reparation for the long bitter years of the slavery holocaust.

The state is very generous in offering first preference to the Caroni workers to lease plots of the company’s lands to venture into farming and other activities giving them a chance to survive. Rightly so this offer expands to other citizens. One of the biggest mistakes any government could make is to award state property along ethnic lines or give it away to big business. Ramnath and others have to wake up, this is not the 1970s when the ULF was in its heyday; bellicosity will not scare away the WTO which has been the engine generating contract labour world wide as the new slavery. The RHAs, NALIS, TTPOST and such entities were not formed out of the brilliance of anybody here but indeed came from minds within the international lending agencies and bodies as the WTO. The state cannot continue to run Caroni as a URP for Indians, they must take a page out of the book of the former banana producing Caribbean islands who are surviving on account of reinventing themselves. We now see crisp television ads attracting our natives and others to Grenada, Barbados, Domonica and elsewhere. With banana gone they were forced to scramble and create viable industries to survive. The Caroni workers now have the same opportunity and should take it.

Mc Donald James
Couva