The Enigma of Arrival

Let's turn to a different island. 

Trinidad!  This majestic isle, this historic land, this place of wonders, it grips the Western imagination with images of … of … of … uh … ah.

Isn’t Trinidad a city in Cuba?

No, Trinidad doesn’t occupy much of a place in the collective imagination of the English-speaking world.  Nor the Spanish-speaking one.  And while the plucky performance of the T&T team in the first round of the World Cup certainly changed my opinion of soccer, I really doubt that it changed too many people’s (lack of) opinion about Trinidad.

In recent travels I’ve tried to see how economic statistics translate into how things feel on the ground.  In the Philippines, for example, you could see the undervalued exchange rate in the low low prices, you could feel the screwed-up labor market in the prevalence of overmanned service businesses, and you couldn’t miss the impact of remittances in the form of giant McMansions sitting in the middle of otherwise impoverished slums. 

In Trinidad, the headline statistic would be economic growth.  Since 1995, the place has grown at an average annual rate of 8 percent—last year, in 2006, it grew twelve.  And this isn’t merely the dead-cat bounce of a once-rich petroeconomy:  GDP matched its 1982 high in 1999, only the fourth year of the boom.  The numbers are awesome.  They amaze.  They inspire.  Are they real?

An answer below the fold.

At first glance, no.  There’s a lot of construction downtown (see picture), but considering that two years ago downtown Port-of-Spain consisted of precisely two high-rises, it doesn’t take a whole lot to make an impression.  Downtown is full of crappy little shops selling all sorts of junk and managing to do so without anything even resembling charm.  Only the occasional blast of air-conditioning will tell you that you’re in a country in the middle of an energy-driven economic boom.  And while Port-of-Spain is bustling with people, it doesn’t feel particularly prosperous. 

The eastern inner neighborhoods of Belmont and Laventille, meanwhile, seem to have seen better days.  So, in fact, do the nicer western neighborhoods.  (That’s a misleading impression, especially for Laventille, but I’ll get into that later.)    There’s some construction in the west of town and the glimmerings of a tourist center, but nothing that jumps out at you. 

Upon further investigation, however, the boom becomes obvious.  You just have to stop thinking like a tourist and start thinking like an American.  Where would you most expect to see signs of economic growth?

That’s right, the suburbs.  Port-of-Spain is either a smallish town of 50,000 people huddled near a bay or a mid-sized city of 550,000 that sprawls out twenty miles to the west along the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway.  Once you start thinking of the capital as a largish auto-centered metropolis, you can’t miss the good times. 

Head west out of town, past the crowded commercial alleyway that goes under the misnomer of the Eastern Main Road.  You’ll soon spot the giant new supermarket in the middle of the suburb of St. Joseph.  Similar supermarkets dot other suburbs.  Spanky-new American-style malls and power centers are in the process of congealing around major intersections.  New factories — particularly, it seems, of air-conditioning equipment, which the island is mysteriously successful at exporting — line the Churchill-Roosevelt Highway.  Piarco Airport has a new terminal.  And brand-new "government houses" sprout among former sugar fields. 

The "government houses" are state-financed, but owner-occupied.  The  government is 27,000 houses into a 100,000 house program that started in 2002.  In a country with only 353,000 housing units (as of 2000) and a declining population, that’s a big change. 

And the government’s program isn’t the only game in town. Home Construction Limited—a subsidiary of the company formerly known as Colonial Life—is building an entire American-style edge city around a shopping mall near the airport.  Only the hills in the distance and the cars barrelling along the wrong side of the road tell you that you’re not in one of Atlanta’s southern suburbs. 

The story is similar to the east, outside the city limits, where in the last decade Chaguaramas—pronounced, inexplicably, "Shagaramas"—has changed from an abandoned American military base, in which one could contemplate the sweep of history and decline of empires as "the huge steel buildings echo in silence," into a great place to go clubbing, hang out at the beach, or hold a wedding. 

At ground level, then, this petro-boom pretty much looks like any other sort of boom.  That doesn’t mean that it is, of course—natural resource booms don’t have a good record in terms of staying power. 

Contrary to popular belief, however, resource booms don’t have a particularly bad record either.  They’re more like the tides.  They come in, and then they go out, leaving good memories and lumps of wet sand.

President Yoweri Musaveni of Uganda raised this uncomfortable issue during his recent state visit.  Between a Chávez-like declaration that Caricom should become the sixth region of the African Union and a Kennedyesque announcement that Africa needs a space program — "We must go to the moon also.  We cannot let them go alone.  We must not let them go up there and look down on us. We must go, too, to ask them, ‘What are you doing here?’" — Museveni (who is, in fact, a very smart guy) bluntly asked the president of Trinidad’s state-owned National Gas Company, Frank Look Kin, what’s going to happen when the gas runs out. 

Look Kin had three responses.  The first consisted of the standard bromides about education and Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s intention to turn Trinidad (along with Tobago, of course) into a developed country by 2020.  The second was that the country’s natural gas reserves have increased by 6½ trillion square feet since 1996, and would last until 2024 at the current rate of production, even without new discoveries.  The third will be the subject of the next post. 

Museveni then said that questions about Trinidad-after-gas could be better answered by a government minister, and proceeded to grill Look Kin about the cost of electricity, where T&T intends to get the bauxite to feed its aluminum industry, and the use of natural gas in steelmaking. (I said he was a smart guy.  Maybe an African space program is worth a second glance.)

Can Trinidad "develop" by 2020?  What does that mean anyway?  And what will happen after gas?  Those are the 18.2-billion dollar questions.  I don’t know the answers.  Gentle readers?

Comments

[Bernard Guerrero]

F*, I want the follow up on Prong #3. The other crap he tossed out was boilerplate. Offshore floating LNG terminals to move downstream? That cockamamie OPEC-for-Gas that the Russians were talking about? What?

[Carlos]

Re: African space program. The last non-South African one which had serious backing was OTRAG, Germans in Zaire using bundled pipe rockets in the 1970s. (You may only think the word 'fasces' here.) One cunning way they planned on reducing costs was to use mass-produced off-the-shelf items, like windshield washer pumps for fuel lines.

I don't know about you, but I don't trust those on a car that much, let alone with rocket fuel in them.

Anyway, with the current elasticity of demand for travel to orbit somewhat lower than flights on business class, even if they could reduce costs by a factor of ten, it wouldn't do a whole lot.

Back to Trinidad -- my aunt's name, incidentally.

[Will Baird]

The last non-South African one which had serious backing was OTRAG, Germans in Zaire using bundled pipe rockets in the 1970s.

o.0

That's scary.

Very scary.

[Andreas Morlok]

Weird story,indeed. Intersting (and critical) article (in german, but with lots of pictures:
http://www.bernd-leitenberger.de/otrag1.shtml )

[Bernard Guerrero]

"You may only think the word 'fasces' here."

Heh. Heh heh.