Hemisphere’s energy ministers coming to TT

PRIME MINISTER Patrick Manning revealed that the energy ministers of all nations in the western hemisphere will be assembling for a summit in Trinidad and Tobago in April or May. Addressing a news conference at the Red House last Friday to update the country about Caricom’s latest initiative to restore peace in Haiti, the Prime Minister said he met with assistant secretary in the US Department of Energy, Vicki Bailey, minutes earlier. Manning disclosed that one of the things discussed was a summit of the hemisphere’s energy ministers in Port-of-Spain in May. The Prime Minister’s discussions with Bailey come on the heels of talks in Washington DC last December between Manning and US president George W Bush and TT’s energy security featured prominently in those talks.

TT currently accounts for 68 percent of all LNG shipped into the US and supplies LNG to all four regasification plants on the American eastern seaboard.  Manning will open the TT 2004 Petroleum Conference at the Hilton Trinidad which brings together the region’s major players in government, finance and energy. This conference could be the most important of its kind in recent memory, given the Prime Minister’s energy discussions in England and Spain with energy companies British Petroleum, British Gas and Repsol YTF. On the resolution of the Haitian crisis, Manning said one of the proposals suggested to the Haitian Opposition (and which will be conveyed to Haitian President Jean Bertrand Aristide by Bahamian PM Perry Christie) is the creation of “a broad-based advisory council” to the Haitian government until a functioning Parliament can be elected in the shortest possible time.

The Prime Minister said the next Haitian prime minister must be someone who commands the national confidence and Caricom would play its part to ensure that Haiti’s government and opposition agree on a suitable person for this post. Manning added that the Haitian constitution must be upheld “in particular in relation to the power of the prime minister” relative to that of the president and the restoration of peace in Haiti would involve significant sacrifice by Caricom’s leaders. Foreign Affairs Minister Knowlson Gift said the Organisation of American States (OAS) Resolutions 806, 822 and 1959 defined a schedule to Aristide to return Haiti to an acceptable level of stability. Gift conceded that Caricom’s work would be easier once Aristide sticks to “the democratically-crafted agenda in so far as the restoration of democracy in Haiti.”