Trinidad and Tobago is sitting on a huge foreign exchange earner—Carnival—but comprehensive data related to the annual event is needed to boost investments and drive the growth of the “creative economy”, say Carnival stakeholders.
Yesterday, they called on the Central Bank to “step up” and capture this data on a systematic basis.
“If not doing it yourself, ensuring that it’s done by the other institutions in the ecosystem and being done in some kind of collaboration. And why is this so important? If you read the newspaper, if you listen to what’s happening on radio, television, everybody’s concerned about the foreign exchange crisis in Trinidad and Tobago. There is no crisis,” pointed out Dr Keith Nurse, president, College of Science, Technology and Applied Arts of Trinidad and Tobago (COSTAATT).
“It is that we are not managing our foreign exchange well. We are not boosting potential sources and we’re not managing our expenditure or use of foreign exchange well. This sector is a major source of foreign exchange and the Central Bank and other sectors need to step up and play a critical role,” he added.
“You cannot manage anything that you can’t measure because you don’t know if you’re doing better this year than last year or 20 years ago. If you’re actually not collecting data, and capturing data on something that is so important to us, it means basically that you are being left behind by the world,” said Nurse.
Jerome Precilla, president of the T&T Promoters Association, agreed.
He said during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Association had to present to Government a proposal on why the entertainment and creative sector should be reopened.
“And it was difficult for us to show, in terms of the value our industry held, because of the lack of data. And when we called around to this one and that one to get data nobody had data,” he said.
Precilla said there was also no entity capturing the data.
“Is the Central Bank collecting the data, is CSO (Central Statistical Office) collecting the data? There is no entity that is reaching out to the industry saying we are doing a survey and we want to collect the data,” he said.
Precilla and Nurse made the points at a panel discussion hosted by the Central Bank of Trinidad and Tobago, titled “Re-engineering the economics of Carnival for sustainability”.
‘End of that’
Nurse, an economist, said he had been researching Carnival for about 25 years.
He said T&T’s capacity to “measure” was worse now than it was 20 years ago.
“Back in the good old days, the Central Statistical Office used to do a publication called the Carnival Digest, and it used to be published every year. It was the most and the best sources of data on festivals anywhere in the Caribbean. And then they had the fire at the CSO, a change in staff and that was the end of that,” he recalled.
“And it took a number of years before the Tourism Ministry and even the Central Bank started collecting some of this data, but for a number of years we went without any institution collecting the data on Trinidad and Tobago Carnival,” Nurse said.
“So it means then that, in a strange way, we all cherish this thing called T&T Carnival, but we’re not investing in it. We’re not investing in it from a strategic standpoint because, in effect, we view this as an event, as a party, as a really good time, but not as an industry,” he emphasised.
Nurse said this is why the bulk of funding that goes into Carnival is spent for the event and not to build the industry.
He said this was unlike Canada, which invests in boosting its artists, facilitating their trade and ensuring that they generate income from intellectual property.
“I bet you if we were to document T&T’s Carnival in a systematic way and do this consistently, then we would be surprised by the impact. It would then encourage us to make further investments and generate what I would call a stronger creative and digital creative economy and the youth economy in particular, because this industry really drives new jobs and entrepreneurship for young people,” Nurse said.
Precilla highlighted that T&T’s main source of foreign exchange, oil and gas, was now “running out”.
He said Trinidad and Tobago was sitting on a product (Carnival) that could generate much-needed foreign exchange for the country.
“Do we invest in our Carnival and invest in our creative sector in making it better for the next year? If you want to make something better, as Dr Nurse said, you have to measure this thing. Are we measuring? Central Bank, are we tracking the money and this way you can come in? Where is the money going? How does it trickle down to the last man on the street who’s selling chewing gum outside the fete…?” Precilla asked.
“So people may say Trinidad and Tobago Carnival makes X amount of money because of visitor arrivals, but nobody is tracking and measuring that trickle-down effect throughout the entire ecosystem of what Carnival does for us and our economy…we need to focus a bit more on the trickle-down effect and follow the money and invest more in it,” he urged.
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