Ryan Hadeed
Of all the books in the Christian Bible, none are as cryptic or frightening as the Revelation of Jesus Christ to John the Apostle, the last part of the New Testament. One of the more well-known prophecies is the coming of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which is believed to symbolise a series of calamities that are destined to befall mankind.
They are conquest, war, famine and death; each occurring in that order. Concerning the third rider, who is astride a black horse and carries a pair of scales, the passage (Revelation 6:6) reads: “A quart of wheat for a denarius, and three quarts of barley for a denarius.” Biblical scholars have proposed that it indicates the rising cost of food, where an entire day’s wage would be spent on buying enough to feed a single person. As the price of oil continues to fall, does a similar economic forecast loom in our future?
The prime minister’s address last week Tuesday contained just over four thousand words and lasted about half an hour. He clearly intended to take his time as he outlined our current situation, including the events that led up to it and the initiatives that he believes will enable us to weather the rainy days to come.
To his credit, he made no attempt to sugar-coat the reality, summing it up with the statement that, “We are where we are!” On one hand, yes, we have been here before; this won’t be the first time we’ve had to deal with a recession resulting from diminished export earnings. But on the other hand, the fact that we are here once again means that we have done nothing to avoid such a predicament. And we have only ourselves to blame.
Despite what we are being told, the real problem isn’t the falling price of oil, nor is it the fiscal misappropriation of the previous administration. The issue we are facing is one that has been in the making for decades, and it’s our failure as a nation to diversity our economy.
“If we hearken back to our days in secondary school, the lessons pertaining to T&T’s colonial past included the description that we were a “plantation economy,” a reference to the period when our society was dedicated to the production of sugar.
“But in truth we never moved past that mentality, having simply traded one export for another. We’re no longer tilling the soil for the white gold used to sweeten English tea, now we’re drilling into the earth for the ‘black gold’ known as ‘Texas Tea.’”
We are fortunate to have been blessed with an abundance of the natural resource that the modern world runs on.
After all, the boom years of the 1970s not only built our country’s existing infrastructure, but also a plethora of white elephants; some of which may eventually be fully utilised. However, we’ve also learned that those days aren’t meant to last.
It’s during the lean times that our leaders are quick to talk about solutions: the immediate measures of reduced spending and the long term need of diversifying our economy. But we never seem to get around to the second notion, for as soon as the times of plenty return, diversification is forgotten and the can is kicked farther down the road.
So while the prime minister was correct when he said: “We are where we are,” he should have added the words, “Yet again.”
Make no mistake—it is inevitable that either our supply of oil and natural gas will run out, or the demand will decline as the world reduces its consumption of fossil fuels.
In order to avoid a future of persistent poverty, hard choices have to be made with regards our foreign and domestic monetary policies. The process is going to be long and difficult, and it might be one of the greatest challenges we face as a nation, but we must prevail.
Otherwise the dependence on oil will only lead to our undoing, and herald the coming of the third horseman.
