{"id":56594,"date":"2026-10-15T19:23:05","date_gmt":"2026-10-15T23:23:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=56594"},"modified":"2026-10-15T19:23:05","modified_gmt":"2026-10-15T23:23:05","slug":"spend-wisely-amid-job-losses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/?p=56594","title":{"rendered":"Spend wisely amid job losses"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Raffique Shah
\nOctober 10, 2026<\/em> <\/p>\n

Raffique Shah<\/a>The thing about an economic recession is it does not steal upon us like the proverbial \u201cthief in the night\u201d. More like the fabled Brigand of Kandahar\u2014he has been lying, at times noisy, other times secretly constructing his web of destruction in full view of his victims who just don\u2019t seem to be fully cognisant of all the blatant signs he has been sending them.<\/p>\n

Traditional economics dictates that countries that are on the brink of toppling over are not yet in recession. Their economies must wait until they get to two quarters, taking them to the brink of collapse, then they will have reached the critical point. Many European nations have been teetering on the edge of economic crisis for the longest while, unable to pay outstanding debts.
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\nBut this time things are getting progressively worse with us. We have companies like Nutrien shutting down, and others like Proman scaling down operations. And, from last year we had the whole lot of CEPEP and URP workers laid off with no return to work in the public sector so far. Most of these people remain at home today, doing nothing or a few days a week or month here or there, barely making enough to cover their weekly expenditure.<\/p>\n

Energy-sector employee lay-offs are not uncommon to us. This is almost a given\u2014the companies just vary from one political party tenure to another. This does not make this less troubling, but it is concerning because this is where the \u201cbrain-drain\u201d begins. All our talent migrating to greener pastures while yearly the government of the day searches for ways to keep us from drowning.<\/p>\n

We did not need to wait until last week for Nutrien to tell Government that they were shutting down operations in Trinidad and Tobago. If it will offer any comfort to the captains of industry who rely extensively on gas and oil to keep their plants running, they will have a longer wait, as the oil and gas shortage appears to be a never-ending cycle. Not to mention the political games played and the sweetheart deals struck between huge oil conglomerates and small countries like ours.<\/p>\n

We were lucky to have benefited from the extensive knowledge and experience of our energy sector experts, who must have warned our leader to treat seriously with the threats of the multinationals.<\/p>\n

Similarly, our expertise in petrochemical downstream gives us an advantage to plan well ahead for the fallouts we are currently experiencing. We should never be taken by surprise whenever companies close down. One only has to look at the global energy sector performance to gauge how our local economy would reflect such issues.<\/p>\n

Global uncertainties in times of war especially often wreak havoc with oil prices, affecting countries like ours which depend heavily on our earnings from our oil and gas sector.<\/p>\n

We should note, too, when countries retaliate against their oppressors or when bigger nations bully smaller ones, by the simple mechanism of the closure of a port, or ship and tanker travel route, we feel direct impacts from those fallouts which are seemingly insignificant to us and our affairs, because they are halfway across the world. Once it involves petrochemicals, no matter where in the world it occurs, it will affect us.<\/p>\n

Even more than the oil and gas squeeze, we face a bigger problem. Our food supply is largely imported not just from our regional neighbours, but beyond the Caribbean\u2019s borders. Up until very recently, leaders and economists the world over thought that the ability of a country to sustain itself by its food output was enough to keep them afloat and pull them out of poverty.<\/p>\n

Guyana\u2019s agriculture system is robust with its vast land space, modern technologies, and their efficient usage of their land. They are said to be the only country in the world that produces food from the seven food groups in the right proportions to feed their nation. Yet still at least 20% of their population still lives below the poverty line, unable to access those nutritious foods.<\/p>\n

Part of their problem lies in distribution and storage, the costs of which are always on the rise, forever creating problems for smaller nations like ours. Locally, we simply do not have the land space to plant and produce the volume of food necessary to feed our people, but that does not mean we cannot find a proper compromise to reduce our imports bill.<\/p>\n

Like most countries in the world, our staple food is a ten-piece bucket of chicken and fries. We remain oblivious to the health and economic consequences of this habit. Fast foods lead to fast diseases and fast deaths. We cannot complain about economic duress when we are responsible for how we spend our hard-earned money.<\/p>\n

The Government has their job to do, but we also have ours. Spend wisely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Raffique Shah October 10, 2026 The thing about an economic recession is it does not steal upon us like the proverbial \u201cthief in the night\u201d. More like the fabled Brigand of Kandahar\u2014he has been lying, at times noisy, other times secretly constructing his web of destruction in full view of his victims who just … Continue reading Spend wisely amid job losses<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[169],"class_list":["post-56594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-tt","tag-raffique-shah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=56594"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56594\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56595,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/56594\/revisions\/56595"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=56594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=56594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.trinidadandtobagonews.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=56594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}